


In the Bleak Midwinter

by x_los



Category: Blake's 7
Genre: Christmas, Christmas Truce of 1914, M/M, Post Gauda Prime, Reconciliation, Redemption, References to Dickens
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-21
Updated: 2015-12-21
Packaged: 2018-05-08 00:55:04
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 32,244
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5477096
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/x_los/pseuds/x_los
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A year after their encounter on Gauda Prime, Blake and Avon are engaged in a war of attrition.</p>
            </blockquote>





	In the Bleak Midwinter

**Author's Note:**

  * For [aralias](https://archiveofourown.org/users/aralias/gifts).



> There’s a phrase about republics that my beta Elviaprose suggests I stole from Executrix’s ‘Back to the Raft’. Stealing becomes a compliment if you acknowledge having done it, though.
> 
> Here's the WONDERFUL podfic, by Aralias!  
> https://aralias.livejournal.com/850417.html

It was no way to spend Christmas. It was no way to spend any time at all. Five months they’d been bogged down on Sundera, and they’d little to show for it. _Yes_ , Avon understood and even agreed with the reasons they were here. It didn’t mean he had to pretend to be enjoying himself. Their forces (‘their’, now that was a laugh—call it Blake’s army, that was far more accurate) were crammed down into a defensive line, with the Federation troops in a parallel position and a quaint, lethal little no man’s land between them.

The term was accurate. This was, essentially, trench warfare: as anachronistic as besieging a fortress. There was no getting sub-atmospheric craft past the other side’s surface-to-air missiles. Teleporting troops down into unknown positions in heavily occupied enemy territory was difficult given that both sides were relying on force shields, and butchery by any other name even if you could manage it—the assault team that had tried it wearing dead Federation troopers’ uniforms hadn’t returned.

Blake had resorted to old, old tactics. They’d tried tunneling under the line, for example, only to meet disguised force shields that fried the first soldier to advance. Whoever was leading the Federation troops knew history as well as Blake did. Such resourcefulness and imagination were unusual traits in a Federation commander, and they compelled a wry admiration from Avon. Blake’s signature traits always did, in the man himself—why not their reflections in others?

When their soldier, _Blake’s_ soldier—a slip of a boy, over-eager, advancing before Blake had given the all-clear, Nova all over again—had burned, Vila had begun to make an awful gallows joke. Blake had spun around to give him a terrible, wretched, furious look. It had choked Vila, rammed the words in his throat, stillborn. The worst of it was how, in among with the pain and rage, there had been such exhaustion in Blake’s expression. Blake had looked diminished, and it had been awful to witness.

Avon himself had known better than to say anything, now.

Nor could they simply fly, above the atmosphere, to the other side of the enemy’s line—their ground-troops and the Federation both lacked sufficient space-reinforcements for that. The few ships both sides had above Sundera were locked in stalemate. Not even that—Tarrant was outclassed, up against a next-gen pursuit ship with something that made the Scorpio look palatial, holding his own only by virtue of great talent and even greater determination not to fail. Or rather, not to fail _Blake_.

“Tarrant would do just about anything for your approval,” Avon had mocked early on, soon after Blake had joined them on Sundera. Blake hadn’t even risen to the bait. Just stared out before him, no doubt thinking of other bright young boys and girls who had been similarly willing to give their lives for him. Not simply his cause, their shared endeavor: him. And how many had done it.

Avon wished to hell he hadn’t said anything. Wished he could help hurting Blake. But he couldn’t take back his words or anything else, so he let it drop and found something else to do—not leaving, not conceding the field. He simply took up some work—something to occupy his hands and make himself look busy—and pretended he hadn’t wanted to speak to Blake beyond that. (Of course he had. Of course he _did_.)

Tarrant was bereft of reinforcements because no additional ships could be spared. The Greater Fleet was, per usual, engaged in attempting to isolate Federation ships, destroy supply lines, and pick off the remnants of Star-Killer Samor’s fleet. The nature of their work made them difficult to contact—Greater Fleet ran on silent, most of the time. It was led by one of their Betafarlian allies. Blake thought it best to let the warlord contingent get on with taking advantage of the opportunities the destruction of Star One had created with limited oversight from him: he and his people were more usefully engaged in opening up more such opportunities.

They had always known intelligence and guerilla strikes would win this war—not brute force, which the Federation could always offer more abundantly. The Greater Fleet was simultaneously doing necessary work and a sideshow: the Federation knew how to fight a Fleet. Its officers had trained in expectation of facing some nonexistent, classical equal opponent. And because they knew how to do it, and had superior strength in that capacity, they jumped at the chance to engage the rebels in that manner, and so wasted a great deal of time and resources. This further freed up Blake to get on with business. Avon thought the plan elegant, as these things went.

The Scorpio—or rather Slave and the Plaxton drive in a new shell, called by the old name for the sake of convenience—was with Jenna. Jenna was with the Small Fleet, and the Small Fleet was lightyears and lightyears away, far out of comms range, conducting the vital assault on space command. Blake had given that campaign over to the direction of his offensive space-strike team, which consisted of Veron Kasabi, Inga Blake, Tyce Sarkoff and Jenna herself (each of whom was responsible for a flank).

Space Command was more fragmented than it had been. Thus the Small Fleet’s rout of its primary control facility and support structure, while crucial, was both less tricky than it would have been five years ago and would represent less of a triumph, if successful. Blake’s people and Orac alike were relatively sure the Rebels _would_ carry space command: it was a matter of time. Blake was commander and chief, but this major raid didn’t actually need him.

It seemed that the destruction of the final Pylene-50 manufacturing plant, however, did. If they didn’t win this, Avon’s work of the last year, knocking out plant after plant, would unravel as the Federation rebuilt their distribution network. Avon would have set the Federation’s suppressant manufacturing operations back, not routed them. Avon had _not_ given months of grueling labor to planning and carrying out those attacks for his own amusement.

The whole of the war could go either way. Which was frankly better odds than Avon had ever seriously expected them to achieve. If this worked—provided they took Space Command, provided they did well in the next—call if five years—there was a chance. An actual chance. Blake had had the beginnings of an army on GP. Avon had brought him a handful of contacts and the shards of broken agreements, and Blake had gathered them in his hand and rolled them into a ball, and then kept going until the warlord alliance was something more substantial than Avon had ever thought possible. Well, Avon thought, he always had dreamed small, compared to Blake.

However if they did poorly in the next five years, if they lost momentum, the Federation would rebuild. Its new form would in all likelihood be even more thoroughly militarized and retributive than its former incarnation. God knew the Andromedan War had burned the veneer of orderly paternalism clean off the totalitarian state, in the colonies at least.

No one would forget the real threat this rebellion had represented, even if the rebels lost. They’d managed to do a lot of ideological work as it was, and that would have lasting effects. But it would be a generation, perhaps two, before another serious opposition could be mounted, should this one collapse. Avon knew he wouldn’t be alive to see it—and worse, Blake certainly wouldn’t. He couldn’t imagine an unsuccessful end to this rebellion that didn’t result in Blake’s death. And thus, almost certainly, his own.

A battle here, a battle there, they could lose. Would lose, inevitably. But they couldn’t afford many such losses. The way Sundera was dragging on suggested that it was well on the way to claiming some of the scarce, precious resource of their failure. And the defeat on Sundera campaign would be Avon’s fault.

Avon was thinking as much, for the thousandth time this month, when Blake came into their room. He didn’t acknowledge Avon. Just took off his jacket, braced his hands on the back of the chair, stood there in shirtsleeves and stared down at the desk. At nothing in particular.

‘Bad day at the office, dear?’ Avon wanted to joke. Didn’t. Sitting on the bed, he looked up from his papers with a raised eyebrow.

Tired. Blake looked so tired now. Avon had said something, months ago, and Blake had said, not even bothering to snarl, “and what am I supposed to look like?”

That was, of course, fair. No one was working harder than Blake—Blake made sure of that. A streak of masochism in him. Avon had always seen it. Had always thought it would be better spent on him, as well. After all, he’d hurt Blake nicely, and put him back together again afterwards. Bombs and torture weren’t as civilized. Yet sometimes he didn’t think he was even Blake’s favorite form of self-harm. Just the most persistent one (now that Travis was dead, at any rate). The weapon nearest to hand.

Well, what _was_ Blake supposed to look like? Like Blake, for a start. He could have fixed that scar, but he didn’t. It pulled his warm eyes into something harder, marring his smile. Or it would have done, if Blake bothered to smile anymore. Mindwiped and tortured and pulled back to himself with bitter work, on the run and desperate, Blake had found things to laugh about. He didn’t seem to now. His expression barely altered when they fucked. He barely looked pleased when he’d come. Things that would have touched him—he used to be easy to touch—he now brushed off as insincere or inconsequential.

You used to want that, Avon reminded himself. Blake’s susceptibility had used to drive him mad. Perhaps, in hindsight, it had largely been Blake’s susceptibility to things that weren’t him that had bothered him—he’d wanted Blake’s full, undivided attention since roughly the moment they’d first spoken to one another. And every moment since. You thought you wanted this, Avon chastised himself. Well, here it is. Having fun? Why are you so _very_ stupid?

Blake sighed, and Avon watched his broad back moving. Short, deep inhale. Long, shallow exhale.

What is it, he could ask that—no, stupid question. Blake would tell him if it was new. Important. Involved him. And if it wasn’t, if it was just the grind of the same old stresses, or some private pain, Blake wouldn’t want to say. Not to anyone. Not even to him—and perhaps ‘even’ was wrong. Perhaps _he_ would be Blake’s last resort. They shared bodily fluids, not confidences. 

He wasn’t allowed to touch Blake, outside of sex. It hadn’t been said, but Blake’s cold, rigid reception the few times he had tried it had been eloquent. And so Avon fucked him frequently, frantically—more, he suspected, than Blake wanted. Because it was all he had, the only acceptable context for closeness. He could disavow any such desire as an unembarrassing carnal impulse. He didn’t want to hold Blake, he just had to wrap his arms around him for balance.

They barely kissed. Avon _hated_ that. It had come to mean more to him than sex proper. All Blake had to do was lightly kiss him while they fucked, which he did at times as though he were forgetting himself, and Avon was embarrassingly hard, biting back moans and swallowing begging. Avon initiated it only when he was so close he couldn’t help himself, and when he needed it to come Blake allowed it. When he tried it during foreplay, Blake had a way of keeping his mouth shut and the kiss chaste, or of turning his head to the side, that made Avon want to scream.

Blake stripped. Changed for bed. Looked over at him, and Avon understood that Blake was asking if he could turn the light off. Avon put his papers to the side and gestured—why not? The work would still be there in the morning. It always was.

They shared a bed because space and privacy were scarce, not because Blake had expressed any personal desire to do so. Besides, it was more seemly this way. Everyone knew they were having sex, after all. Blake had effectively announced as much, by moving Avon into his room on GP and by refusing to be questioned on the matter. Besides, it was the sort of thing people in close quarters and in organizations like this somehow always did know, even though Avon thought no one could have been less publicly demonstrative than the two of them.

They didn’t touch, in the night, unless it was explicitly sexual. Once Avon had woken up to find Blake curled around him, pressing Avon protectively into him, a hand on his stomach. Avon had shut his eyes and wondered ecstatically whether things might be getting better, unable to help himself. Had thought how very, very good it felt. But he’d drifted off to sleep, hardly able to keep awake in the face of such a feeling of safety and contentment. When he had woken Blake had been out, and it had not happened again. The part of him that was mad (there was a region, in the republic of him, given over to madness—he wondered if there always had been) whined that if he’d only stayed awake, stayed in that moment, he could have prolonged it forever. But he reminded it that Blake had been asleep and insensate and that it didn’t mean anything—certainly not that some inner district of the many conflicting states that together comprised the republic of Blake still regarded him with tenderness.

Besides, Blake was a light sleeper. So much as reaching out to touch his skin, to brush too-long hair away from his face, had him muzzily shooting up as though he’d heard a bombardment. Avon had to say it had been nothing, tell him to go back to sleep. Even Blake’s occasional nightmares were quiet, private things—twitching shudders. Avon had woken him up from one, once, but it had startled Blake badly, and he’d asked Avon not to do it unless Blake were disturbing his sleep.

Avon didn’t, even when the nightmares did just that. He just watched, silent, until Blake subsided. Unable to sleep until he did, and not for the movement. Unbearable, unkempt feeling rising in Avon like a high tide. He had used to think ‘sick with love’ was just an expression, but sometimes he thought he might be dying. He _knew_ he wasn’t, but it _felt_ like the times he’d been close to it. Enduring Blake’s nightmares, at his side but forbidden from touching him, was the dragging pull of his blood from a gut-shot wound in an alley back on Earth.

Blake lay down, and Avon slid until his back was against the mattress rather than the wall. No headboard—such refinements would have been out of place in this setting. Gauche, perhaps.

“Ion canons early tomorrow,” Blake murmured in the dark.

“All right,” Avon said.

He’d look at them first, before the bombardment started. Overloads were always a danger. Avon resented mollycoddling either people or equipment, but people (most people, anyway) weren’t likely to combust and destroy everything in a mile radius, and the canons could be that temperamental. He didn’t let the artillery people stack them close enough to cause a chain reaction, and ballistics had grumbled and taken it up with Blake when Blake had arrived. Blake had patiently backed Avon, then and with every repositioning, until, tired of having to do it, he’d showed the lot of them a little documentary on nuclear chain reactions, explained how ion reactions were worse, and said he expected to hear no more about it. He hadn’t, as far as Avon knew.

Dayna was more sensible about it than the rest of ballistics, but she wasn’t really the type to argue for Avon in company. Didn’t think he needed it. And he didn’t. But he would have appreciated it. He appreciated that Blake did it, even if only out of professionalism, because Avon was right and because there was something like a command structure to uphold here. A rough approximation thereof. And Avon valued loyalty. He liked the idea of Blake giving it to him.

Blake fell asleep, dog tired and dreamless. Effectively alone in the dark, Avon’s face twisted into a private expression of anger with himself. It was, after all, difficult to hate _Blake_ , given the extent to which their current situation was of his own making. Given that Blake had offered him better, on more than one occasion.

Mud and muck and a grinding impasse. Attrition. A feeling of irreparable loss. And a no man’s land between their bodies in the bed, where their hands didn’t touch.

***

They'd talked rather a lot on the Liberator—for all they could argue bitterly on the flight deck, Avon would wager they properly talked more than any other combination of people. He had reason to consider the matter thoroughly enough to make that estimate. He had, after all, to think about whether Blake had other… particular friends. Because they didn’t just talk, they flirted.

They discussed, oh, anything. Politics, occasionally, because it was so woven through the warp and weft of Blake’s thinking that he wouldn’t have known how to avoid the subject completely. Avon didn’t mind that, actually—it wasn’t Podsnappery (a word Blake had given him, which he couldn’t see himself using—still, he rather liked the specificity of it, the plump shape of the word held in his mind: the big round initial syllable pressed against the whip-sharp answering rattle-rap of the rest), it was more like the way some spices came up frequently in a given cuisine. Blake thought in these terms, he couldn’t remember a place he’d lived without remarking in passing on its particular social issues.

Fair enough, it was interesting technical information. Avon found new systems fascinating. Knowledge was valuable, and mysteries yielded if you possessed the appropriate data and framework with which to view them—often revealing more complex problems regarding what to do with that knowledge. Blake liked systems as well, and listened to what Avon was doing with the ship with interest. Asked good questions.

And so what if he was storing it away to use practically later? That was, after all, what one should do with information. Apply it, consider it in light of other information, or the whole thing was moribund and sterile. Blake wasn’t like that. There was a point to him, and Avon rather liked that about him. Envied it, a little, even as he jeered at his own envy.

Their habit of conversation had in fact started with discussions about the ship. Practical matters had led to work and school histories. That had yielded to educational and then general interests. It was easy to keep up a casual flow of words with Blake—their experiences and their tastes overlapped in key ways.

A remarkable thing about Blake was that he might easily have been a dogmatic nightmare of a person. But besides his justified loss of temper on the London (half-starving himself had left Avon embarrassingly shrill and dogmatic in turn, he knew) and his justified continual ire with the Federation (a government that had stifled and then exiled Avon, and executed his lover in the bargain—Avon was none too keen on the establishment either), Avon found Blake impassioned but not prone to ranting. Blake managed to keep his critical facilities sharp, to eschew the comfort of falling into another dogma to replace the Federation’s. Blake’s thinking was adaptive rather than rigid, and he was familiar with and used a variety of theories, political and scientific, without being a slavish devotee of any.

And you _could_ convince him of things, if you fought hard enough. Avon had never felt so smug as when he’d managed to reverse Blake’s rooted opinion of a play Blake had hated. Avon had insisted Blake _did_ like Xano (to the extent anyone ‘liked’ difficult, jagged Xano)—he just hadn’t properly understood that yet. Further, Blake managed to be amusing, much of the time—he seemed to find it easier than Avon did to stave off panic and despair. He wasn’t dull, insensate: he brooded sharply and profoundly, and then wrenched himself back and fought on.

Avon found Blake interesting. Admired him. It wouldn’t do to say so, but he had to acknowledge it in himself. That didn’t, after all, prevent him from often also finding Blake maddening and dangerous to himself and others, namely Avon.

Blake was, Avon would admit if pressed (and he was fairly confident Blake would say as much without compunction), a friend. And Avon would have liked to fuck him, besides.

Several reasons: Blake would be as interesting and adaptable in bed as he was elsewhere. Blake didn’t want for passion. Blake had an incredible voice. Blake was confident, competent and (there wasn’t much getting around it) commanding in a way that made Avon decidedly interested in activities he’d previously found unappealing. He wanted to do things to Blake that he’d never wanted to do to anyone, _because_ Blake was so obviously capable of handling himself. In turn there weren’t many people he’d go down on his hands and knees for, but oh, Blake had an open invitation. His mouth, his hands, his eyes when he focused on anything, when he focused on _Avon_ —

Suffice it to say, Avon wanted him.

Wanted him badly.

Thus he felt a surge of triumph when, in the middle of a conversation—Blake had come to Avon’s bedroom to borrow a tool and had let himself be distracted, and now they were sitting on the couch in Avon’s room, chatting idly—Blake put his hand over Avon’s while making a point, running his fingers over the back of Avon’s hand.

They had been verbally circumnavigating this for some time, but Avon hadn’t quite been able to get a definitive response out of Blake, until now.  

Blake finished speaking. Avon _had_ been engaged in the conversation, but had rather lost the thread of the argument, what with Blake’s fingertips gliding over his knuckles. Avon looked deliberately from his hand up to Blake, meeting his eyes.

“Interested?” Blake asked, voice deceptively mild.

Avon grinned at him. “Obviously.”

Blake smiled back, and Avon wondered whether Blake was handsomer happy or angry. But then a slight frown pulled at Blake’s forehead and displaced that very attractive expression. Avon could feel his own face mirroring the shift.

(That, he thought, was another reason they should have sex—he often caught himself anticipating Blake. There was a ready sympathy between them that often manifested in their bodies. He stumbled, and Blake already had a hand out to steady him. Why not put that affinity to good use? Blake would want more, want it harder, want something different, and Avon half-suspected he’d _know_ , would already be trying to give it to him. At least, it certainly sounded worth a try.)

“I should tell you,” Blake said, explaining his frown, “before anything happens, that I'm emotionally invested in this. I don’t want you going in under false pretenses, thinking it’s exclusively sexual for me. Are you all right with that? Do you want something on those terms? Because if not—perhaps we shouldn’t do this.”

Avon blinked. That, he hadn’t anticipated. So much for sympathy. He’d been leaning into Blake, but leaned back to consider it, an evaluative look passing over his features.

He felt an instinct to push—how involved are you exactly, Blake?—and suppressed it.

He hadn’t thought Blake would be interested in him, like that. After all, he was hardly suitable for Blake. Blake could dally with him, but his _partner_ should surely be someone more politically involved. Someone who brought a dowry of another rebel faction, or something like: an equal in that regard. He wasn’t being ridiculously old-fashioned, Blake wouldn’t be married off like a medieval princess. It was more a matter of what was good for Blake’s endeavors in any larger sense, and thus good for Blake. You couldn’t extricate Blake’s work from his life any more easily than you could extract his politics from his thinking. Avon knew he hadn’t much chance of leaving the Liberator safely, at the moment, but ultimately he wanted to be comfortable, somewhere—not to be a guerilla. As much as he hated to admit to being found lacking in any capacity, he knew he didn’t possess the commitment Blake would need and demand from a partner.

Anna loomed in his mind for two reasons. First, he didn’t want another emotional entanglement right now. Sex, yes, but the heart of him had been left raw and savage and unfit for company, and he didn’t know how long it’d take to clean up the place, if he even could, and he didn’t _want_ to, and it would have felt callous and even traitorous to set about doing it.

Second, he worried because of _how good_ it had felt to change Blake’s mind. That was the sort of power Blake’s partner would have, though Blake would always make exercising it an interesting challenge. Avon had _loved_ it. Nasty as it was, in some respects he felt perhaps more strongly about Blake than he had about Anna. Already.

What, then, if he fell in love with Blake? Blake, who cared deeply about a thousand things besides a partner. Blake, who often put himself in danger. Never thoughtlessly—tactically, with precision, but quite willingly. Who might _well_ die before giving up his nearly-impossible fight. Who’d demand so much of Avon, who would in turn (that sympathy between them wasn’t entirely some figment of his imagination) be giving it before Blake had to ask. He wouldn’t leave when things became untenable, not even if Blake was totally ungrudging about it (and who could be, in the face of a lover’s desertion? And who would want their lover to value them so little?) Oh he could love Blake devastatingly, he saw that now. And then Blake would be hurt, and then Blake would die, and it would gut him. When his entrails spilled out, he’d have a surprised, stupid expression on his face, like a slain animal. If it wasn’t the literal death of him, it’d _kill_ him just the same. As bad as Anna’s death and worse.

Falling in love with Blake was a bad, _bad_ idea. Yes, he supposed _he_ was a bit emotionally invested as well.

“I’m quite willing to sleep with you,” Avon said slowly. “And to do it often, if you like. But I’m not interested in any relationship, beyond our present connection.” He could fuck without romanticizing it. Avon trusted himself that far, and no farther.

“Ah,” Blake said, obviously disappointed.

“I appoligise,” Avon said rather formally.

Blake shook his head, put on an equally distant footing by Avon’s tone. “Quite all right.” He sighed, a little. “Nothing we might work out, I suppose?” Blake clearly wasn’t going to bully him on this.

Avon shook _his_ head. “Nothing I’m interested in working out, I’m afraid.”

Blake winced very slightly. Avon wished he’d said that better.

Blake stood. “Well, we’ve managed to be civilized about it. Thank you for the clamp.” Blake gestured with the tool, and Avon inclined his head in answer. Blake left, and Avon sat on his bed feeling a little deflated and bereft before finding something else to occupy him.

They didn’t stop being friends, afterwards, but the slight awkwardness the conversation had caused between them never entirely dissipated. Avon resented it. Resented Blake for putting it there. Wanted Blake’s companionable attention, wanted Blake to drop in as often and as easily as he had done, wanted the flirting back, missed the potential he’d put to bed himself. There were so many opportunities to say ‘Blake I’ve changed my mind. I want you properly. I want you, I don’t just want a fuck. I want you as you deserve to be wanted, as yourself, and if you’ll still have me, that’s what I’ll try and give you’. Avon let them all slip past.

Later Avon was absolutely enraged with himself for having been the sort of person who’d coldly acknowledged that Blake had looked ripe to be the love of his life, but who had then been too much of a coward to deal with the consequences of that. To even want to talk it through and explain himself. Later, he laughed at the absolute idiocy of imagining he could have regularly fucked Blake without becoming emotionally involved. He’d sat there and looked at the whole shape of his immense attraction to Blake and thought he could _keep this from becoming a problem_. That his grief _as a friend_ , if Blake died, would have been somehow rational and manageable. How stupid was it _possible_ to be?

By the time the Central Control raid went disastrously wrong, Avon understood how deep he was in. Wrapped around Blake, about to die, he had thought—well this is better than dying alone, than him dying alone. Yes, this is how I want it, if it must to come to this. But he’d been angry and frankly frightened. He’d resented Blake for putting him in this position, and for making him care and thus making it infinitely worse. Instead of accommodating what he knew was true, Avon had made desperate last-ditch efforts at abandonment and emotional punishment.

Later, when Blake was missing, when he’d have given anything, confessed everything to make it right, when he _understood_ what he would give, Avon thought he’d made himself ridiculous—a ranting, shouting, lying spectacle on the flight deck, on display in front of everyone they both gave a damn about. Later, he hated how he’d dealt with the knowledge that he loved Blake, during his last months on the Liberator. Hated it just like he bitterly resented how he’d taken Blake’s quite forthright confession of some sentiment where he was concerned.

Later still, Avon suspected that he’d ruined and wasted his life. That he’d squandered everything he had with Blake, all the potential he’d been so delighted by, long, long before he’d managed to actually shoot the man he was entirely devoted to. That he hadn’t made one mistake so much as a lifetime of them. That he himself was one vast error on the balance sheet of the universe.

***

Avon’s head jerked up at the sound, both unfamiliar and intimately so. Blake was singing a song he didn’t know, and the far-off noise was carrying on the thin air.

Blake had sung on a few occasions, on the Liberator:

  1.      While working, when he’d thought himself alone.
  2.      Once when they’d come back from Del 10, high as kites on the naturally-occurring Beta particles.
  3.      Some sort of indecorous low-grade Birthday Song, when presenting Vila with a cake on the occasion of his having survived thirty-six years in a world out to get him, with the surprisingly good counterpoint of Gan.
  4.      In the shower.



Cally, standing in the hall with some things she’d clearly intended to bring to Blake, had pulled Avon aside when he’d been walking past Blake’s door and said _listen_ in his head, obviously amused. He had, and when he’d caught the sound of Blake singing and identified the terrible pop number in question, he and Cally had grinned at one another like children. Cally had left her burden right outside Blake’s door. On the flight deck, Avon had whistled the song under his breath. Blake had put it together, frowned and said ‘very funny’.

“Yes,” Avon had grinned at him, “it is, isn’t it?”

One could walk along the edge of No Man’s Land relatively safely, and Blake did so often. It drove Avon mad (madder, at any rate) (not that he shared this paranoid concern with Blake). It did give away his position, but Blake had a point: if something was getting through the shields, then it was, and Blake was in as much danger from a nuclear weapon in the command bunker as he was over the top. Their safety lay rather in the Federation troops’ equal vulnerability. The Federation currently lacked a command structure capable of convincingly ordering thousands of soldiers to immolate themselves to take out Blake. It also lacked, ready-to-hand, the weapons its troops would need in order to accomplish that.

Blake was taking an observational patrol because, as Dayna put it, scanner readouts were no substitute for human observation and intuition. She always stressed the value of the ancient weapons, and the first among these was the body itself. It was grunt work, and Blake felt it important to do grunt work and to be seen doing it. Soldiers on patrol alone on cold nights like this one often sang to occupy themselves, and Blake was no different. Except the rank and file tentatively murmured snatches of half-remembered Federation pledge songs from school, sensible of the awkwardness of rehearsing the propaganda in this setting, whereas Blake was singing out proudly—something old and rich and mournful. Something about a silent night. And so it was, but for him.

Christmas music, perhaps. It was December, and Avon vaguely knew that, historically, the winter festival had been more than a state occasion on which extra luxury rations were distributed, travel permits were granted for family visits, and everyone was allotted two days off. It had included music in some way. Though he was iconoclastic in many respects, Blake did tend to know about and respect that sort of tradition.

Blake sang beautifully. Avon liked beautiful things, and disliked not having anything beautiful here. But then Blake could, at times, despite how this campaign had worn on him, startlingly remind Avon that people weren’t simply Dayna’s weapons, or, still more grimly, sacks of meat, with no purpose beyond wasting away and/or exploding when they were sniped because they’d stepped outside the force shield. Even marred by the scar (What wasn’t I there to protect you from? Avon wondered, because Blake had never told him.), there was at times a breath-taking quality to Blake’s intent gaze. During sex the way Blake breathed and the tension in his powerful frame held Avon rapt. Avon felt rather ashamed of his entrancement, when Blake shut his eyes, for the most part, and didn’t invite, wouldn’t have welcomed, appreciation.

The way Blake made his body his instrument was, as ever, remarkable, and the low roll of his voice in song against the aching-cold midnight air—a voice that could not be made less than devastating, not by any trial: even ragged and near lost, Avon knew it would strip him to the bone—had the merciless beauty of angels. Avon meant that unromantically and rather literally. Angels’ bodies hadn’t been intended for human touch, and their songs hadn’t been meant for human ears. Blake had explained the idea of the creatures once, years ago. It had stuck with Avon.

Blake’s people had strong a choral tradition, and there was in his voice tonight something terribly alone. This was a song he’d clearly learned to sing in company. Robbed of it, his voice was left brave, determined to press on. And vulnerable. And all the lovelier for all of that. As if every word was the last dying, falling note at the end of a favorite song. The note you strained to hear, that made you compulsively hit replay and summon the song back.

Blake enunciated and projected nicely, and “Lord, at thy birth” both rose and lingered. On a clear night like this the phrase carried far, proclaiming dominion over the world.

And across the dark waste, someone with a less lovely, but an equally firm, resounding voice answered, “Christ, in deiner Geburt.”

Blake stopped suddenly, and a long quiet crept back into the space his voice had filled. Then, voice rising with something like passion, firm but without _expectation_ , Blake began the song again. You could tell from the way the sound didn’t Doppler shift that he was standing fixed, now.

Avon stood up himself and went outside.

Blake barely got out a magisterially slow ‘silent night’ before someone joined him, ‘heilige Nacht’ lapping against his ‘holy night’. As Avon quickly walked towards Blake, he could see that Blake was singing through a widening smile.

“All is calm, all is bright.” It decidedly wasn’t, and Avon was willing to bet it wasn’t ‘schläft’ or ‘wacht’ either.

By the time they’d once more reached the business of lordship from the cradle, and the German (was that German? Avon couldn’t say with any confidence) equivalent, Avon had reached Blake.

Avon said his name, and Blake held out a hand, cutting him off. He was peering across the dark expanse, expression too tense to be called hopeful. White breath curling out of his mouth. Waiting. What was he waiting for?

This, apparently: against the blackness, something white. Not the snow, higher. Blake hurried, calling someone to give him something of the same shade. A soldier scurried to do it, and when he returned with tent-canvas that had once been fairly white, he and Blake managed to hoist it.

“I am Commander Traub, of the Fourth,” whoever had been singing called out upon receiving the signal, her voice thin but audible across the expanse. “In charge of this line. To whom am I speaking?”

“Roj Blake,” Blake said, and Avon darted a glare at him, thinking the disclosure incautious.

“I thought that might be the case,” the woman, Traub, said with a hint of wryness. “Blake, I request a parlay. There are four days and some hours until Christmas, as you know. You and I, after all, seem familiar with the same period of history. So I think you and I both know why we should speak.” Slightly, ever so slightly, stilted English. She spoke Standard well, but it wasn’t her mother-tongue.

From one of the old German colonies thrown out during the Eurozone expansion, before the collapse, Avon guessed. Though how one of their lot had attained a Commander rank, he couldn’t surmise. The Federation had nothing but patronizing nastiness for its impoverished ethnic-German protectorates. Granted the Federation was generally worse about anyone who didn’t happen to be white (they’d exiled Avon, but they’d butchered Dayna’s mother for the lesser crime of criminal association, and Blake said they had seemed not to consider the people on Horizon fully sentient), but it was nonetheless a question of the frying pan versus the fire.

“Give me an hour to consider arrangements,” Blake shouted back.

“Right,” Traub said shortly. “I shall do the same.”

Blake hurried back to the bunker, leaving Avon hard pressed to keep up.

“What’s going on?” Avon asked when they’d reached it, a little dismayed when Blake only laughed. It startled Avon; he’d nearly forgotten the sound of it.

“A minor miracle, I think.”

Avon set his mouth, frustrated. He’d never liked being left out, not knowing what was going on. Miracles weren’t good enough. Avon preferred answers.

***

“I apologise.”

Avon said it flatly. In the medbay of the GP base, the two words sat lumpen, clogging the air like miasma, joining the hospital-smell that inexplicably clung to any space given over to a medicinal function. Blake had explained the Victorian notion of ‘miasma’ to Avon once—they’d been on a planet with a poisonous atmosphere. Low grade, not readily detectable by the Liberator’s scanners. Everyone who’d been down had spent the next week ill.

The theory had sounded like something that _might_ be true, and it had been the first time Avon had had to think seriously about people in the past being at least as intelligent and as engaged in figuring out how the world worked as people in the present. The Federation didn’t do much in the way of historical education, though it had a few favorite periods—Blake’s interest in more than that was in it itself radical. Without recourse to that education, Avon had never had this obvious fact _impressed_ on him before. It had thus been the first time Avon had _felt_ how frail present certainties would look in a few centuries. The absoluteness of supposedly detached knowledge dissolved a little for him (and Blake had a way of looking at knowledge as never truly detached that intellectually appealed to Avon). It was disconcerting, but truer, and he’d valued knowing it. Valued Blake for imparting it. Casually. Blake changed him, altered his world so _easily._

He had valued Blake, and had nonetheless tried very hard to kill him. It had taken two weeks, even with fairly good resources, to return Blake to a stable condition. Tarrant had redeemed himself in Blake’s followers’ eyes by going on a fast medical supply raid with the rest of Avon’s people after having explained the misunderstanding, and by having come back with the drugs rather than making off with the rebels’ craft. No one had been sure that keeping Avon as a hostage was going to hold much water, but they’d had no choice but to take the risk.

Avon had spent the time working rather than looming over Blake’s unconscious body. The doctors had needed the space, and he needed to keep his hands busy, or he’d go stark raving. He had felt it lowering around the edges of him, just outside the small, safe perimeter of equations and tasks. And there had been a great deal to do. Deva was overwhelmed with work, and the security threat represented by the raid on Blake’s command centre had needed countered, hard and fast.

Perhaps, Avon thought in the medical bay, at a loss for words, he could explain. He could tell Blake that he hadn’t, in cold blood, thought that Blake would, without the influence of an external control which would render him blameless, betray everything and everyone he believed in. He hadn’t thought an unarmed man ( _Blake_ ) walking towards him a threat, not really. He hadn’t thought Blake a threat after the first shot. He hadn’t thought him _still_ a threat after the second. He hadn’t decided to stand unmoved as Blake clung to him, refusing to even support the weight of his body. Too far gone for that.

Instead, Blake might view it in light of a miasma. Avon had thought Blake _could_ do it because Anna _had._ Avon had developed bad habits: distrust and violence were his first instincts now. Because he loved Blake as much as he did, he was in equal measure terrified of Blake and what Blake could do to him. Because he respected Blake as much as he did, he was in equal measure devastated by the possibility of Blake’s betrayal. Avon lived in the worst-of-all-possible-worlds, where things went wrong because everything went wrong, where catastrophes piled on top of the last ones and the whole lot rotted into a hot mass of fetid tragedy. And then even that became stale, normal. They dug up the bog and used the peat for fire and scrabbled on, trying to survive.

It was not that he had thought Blake capable of such a venal unmaking of himself. It was not that he’d logically believed Blake would snap his neck and sell him for a bounty and expect to get out of that transaction alive and with money and do _something_ with it. It was that he had been breathing in bad air for a long while, and if he wasn’t jibbering out loud, that was only because he did his raving in his head. Everyone was mad here—he wasn’t special, and it wouldn’t do to get excited about it.

“All right,” Blake said. Someone else had come in when Blake had just woken up, answered his sharp ‘what’s happened?’ and given him the progress report—Deva, probably. Avon had only been told half an hour after Blake had woken, and he’d glared poisonously at his informant, slammed down his tools mid-job, and stalked off to the medbay himself. Someone had obligingly cleared the room, to give him and Blake a bit of time to settle the matter. Again—Deva, probably.

Hesitantly, Avon had stepped forward towards Blake’s bed after Blake spoke. Raised a hand unused to delicacy to Blake’s face, the side that had been scared in his absence. Hadn’t touched him. It hovered there, in the air between them.

“I’m _sorry_ ,” Avon said emphatically.

Irritation flashed in Blake’s eyes. “I heard you the first time. Leave it, Avon. It’s done. We can only move on.”

Avon nodded, jerkily, let his hand drop, and let Blake ask him more specific questions about their time apart and what he was doing at present. Avon kept it terse—there was a great deal to cover, and some things he preferred not to. He neatly glossed over the Terminal incident, though of course it had to come into the account, given what he’d lost there. Blake took it well. Avon deflected the dimensions of his history that he really didn’t want to discuss by asking his own questions about Blake’s recovery timeline, what they should tell people about this incident (they neatly established a party line—stress Arlen, call it a misapprehension, an accident), and Blake’s own activities in Avon’s absence (numerous and largely more successful than his own). When Blake looked liable to pierce through Avon’s evasions, Avon gave him the warlord alliance to chew on—and that of course occupied Blake until, still weak, he lapsed back into sleep.

Avon had held himself together against grief and terror and the overwhelming feelings attendant on being with Blake again. But with Blake recovered, and with the inevitable tense conversation survived, as soon as Blake lapsed into sleep Avon felt nameless things inside him snap like over-stressed support beams. Avon watched Blake for a moment—the rise and fall of his chest in sleep—and then, seized by an impulse he couldn’t control, he did run a shaking hand over the scar on Blake’s face. He pressed a frantic kiss to Blake’s temple. Breathed hard like he might sob, and didn’t. Later, he’d learn that any fraction of this was the sort of thing that woke Blake. That he’d been lucky Blake was so drugged—that his sleep, at present, was something closer to a comatose state. Later, Avon wouldn’t want to know what he’d looked like, then, clutching Blake’s knit-together side, making a strange, high, inarticulate noise—a parody of demented tenderness, probably.

He’d swept himself together and left. Blake’s recovery had been so gradual and piecemeal (he’d been saved when Avon’s people had come through with the drugs, he’d been saved after week one, when his prognosis had been declared good, he’d been saved when he’d come out of the coma with no damage to his mind at week two) that Avon didn’t even really feel _relief_ , per se. There again, he half expected something would come and take this away from him.

The sense of release and catharsis came two days later. He’d come to Blake’s room with some work for him, Blake having been at last released and allowed to resume his command functions. The atmosphere between them had been formal, tense. Blake had been sitting at his desk, while Avon stood. Avon had been at the mercy of another uncontrollable impulse to touch, and he’d put his hand over Blake’s.

Blake’s fingers, he remembered, had traced light circles over his knuckles. His own hand sat heavy on Blake’s, comparatively graceless, and when Blake didn’t shake it off, the hold tightened compulsively into a clutch.

“If this is guilt, Avon, I don’t want any of it,” Blake said slowly.

“Not guilt,” Avon said, wondering whether, somehow, Blake didn’t see that he could only have managed to fail Blake so spectacularly because Blake had made such a conquest of him. Perhaps he could demonstrate. “Are you well enough?”

“I’m well enough, yes.” Blake looked at him, and Avon couldn’t find much in the expression to hang on to.

“Are you interested?” Avon pressed, mirroring Blake’s question, asked years ago, now. Not sure if Blake remembered the scene as clearly as he did.

“Yes,” Blake said after a moment. “Or as you’d put it, why not?”

Avon laughed, slightly, relieved that Blake was making a joke—a joke predicated on knowing him well, no less. He wondered if he had it in him to _be_ the Avon of two years ago—the version of himself Blake had been ‘emotionally involved’ with. Perhaps they’d get on fine as they were, and who was to say Blake hadn’t changed? (Though in substantial ways, Blake never changed.) But he wanted to be that Avon, for Blake. He’d liked that Avon rather better than he liked the present version. He felt the person he had been then, with Blake, to be realer, more stable. More ‘authentic’, for whatever that was worth. And he could work his way back, perhaps, given time. Blake’s presence. A bit of security, a little room to breathe. If Blake was agreeing to this, he suspected he could do rather a lot.

He didn’t quite believe it until, kneeling beside Blake’s chair to do it, he was kissing Blake, and Blake was letting him. Not responding passionately—what did Avon expect? He’d only just come out of hospital—but opening up for him, letting him in. He held Blake, and after a moment broke away, breathing hard.

“I—” he began.

“You, you, you,” Blake said dryly, with a small smile. “Wouldn’t this be easier on the bed?”

Avon nodded, and forced himself to go slowly. Not to scrabble at Blake’s clothing; not to come in contact with the wounds he ached to touch by way of apology, and to assure himself that they were healing, that Blake would be fine; not to fuck Blake with brutal, desperate passion, denied a long, long while, banked up and finally released with a snap. Neither would it have been acceptable to be maudlin and overly tender: he was afraid of scaring Blake off, or of repulsing him. He was afraid of what he’d do. It wouldn’t do for Blake to understand the awful intensity of his regard, he knew it wasn’t quite sane. Blake had seen more than enough of it there in the tracking gallery, where he’d almost died of it.

Blake looked Avon in the eye while he stroked Avon off. Avon shuddered for him and came far too quickly, with far too much noise and obvious appreciation. He barely even thought to be embarrassed by that, because coming freed him up to gather Blake to him and suck him off gently. Blake’s hand in his hair as he breathed through his climax. Blake’s hand cupping his face as Blake regarded him almost solemnly, after.

“Do you want me to go?” Avon asked, after a few minutes had passed.

“I want you to do whatever you’d like,” Blake said in response. His voice even, as though he were being careful with it. Perhaps he was as nervous as Avon himself was. Avon felt a swell of fondness for him. He didn’t need to be, he’d show Blake that. Blake need never be afraid of any poor response from Avon, they were past all that now. Anything was all right, between them. Blake would see.

“Then I’d like to stay,” Avon said, with a smile. Still able, he was relieved to find, to smile gently, when the occasion called for it—lately he’d been given to coming over either too manic or too fey and haunted.

“Right,” Blake said, and they got ready for bed, Avon feeling bizarrely anxious (he’d not felt _anxious_ like this in years—nothing had mattered to him like this in years) and tamping down on elation. Blake fell asleep. Avon watched the rise and fall of his whole, broad chest, and thought.

It seemed they wouldn’t need to discuss anything. Avon rejoiced in how easily Blake understood him. He’d apologized and meant it, and he’d been granted forgiveness. What was this but forgiveness? Such an easy graciousness on Blake’s part. Incredible, really. He didn’t deserve it, he knew he didn’t.

He’d had Blake. He loved Blake, loved him desperately, and he looked likely to have him in future. And Blake must care about him, still. He’d been waiting for him, he’d said that. They could talk more, they’d have time. He’d find out exactly where Blake stood, he’d express exactly where he stood with words. He didn’t think proofs necessary, precisely, but he thought he’d welcome, after everything, a chance to demonstrate his position, to give some testament to it—he’d been unable to do so for such a long while.

The sex hadn’t been gymnastic and opulent, but there was time for all that as well. And it would probably take time, for Blake to become reacquainted and comfortable with him. For them to be as close as they’d ever been and much closer, like Avon wanted. Closeness seemed to him a precious resource, now. It had been good, _wonderful_ to be touched and brought to climax by someone he trusted, by _Blake_ , perhaps more so to be able to do the same to him. And it was the start of something even better.

Most of the mistakes he had made could be put to rights, and things made good as new. Granted, their position was as perilous as ever, but Avon almost couldn’t feel the threat at present. If he had Blake, and Blake loved him, then everything would turn out all right.

***

“Explain,” Avon said, as Blake rushed to pull up the schematics for the force bubble.

Blake gestured at the projection of the shield. “How far can we stretch this into no man’s land before we face signal degradation or expose our rear? Almost to the middle of the dead-zone, correct?”

“Yes,” Avon said automatically, “to grid-point F7, on that readout. Blake—”

“Then they could to the same,” Blake said.

“Not quite—their shield isn’t as good as ours, in terms of its signal-strength. Recall that I almost succeeded in scrambling it, our second month here.” Not that almost was good enough.

Blake nodded. “But they could get out to F5.”

“I expect they could. _Blake_ —”

“And that’s close enough to have a loud, clear conversation, with no need to exchange possibly bugged or bombed signaling equipment,” Blake concluded.

Avon nodded. It was.

“How long will it take you to press the bubble out?”

Avon pursed his lips. Thought. “The tech team can have that within the hour.”

“And the Federation’s?”

“Longer.”

“By how much?”

“Call it double, for safety’s sake.”

“I still have that force vest,” Blake murmured to himself, and Avon winced (glad Blake couldn’t see him do it). The force vest in question, now repaired after absorbing most of the energy of successive blaster shots, was all that had kept Avon from killing Blake.

“Soolin could be set up in a sniper position, in case they somehow manage to bring down the shields. I don’t see _how_ , but then that’s rather the point of surprise attacks. Dayna can come along, as a guard—I’d have to allow their Commander the same accommodations.” Blake had his communicator out and was sending Soolin and Dayna and the tech team messages. “Avon, you’ll have to fill tech in on the specifics of this. They won’t see how to do it without you.”

They usually didn’t.

“Why do you want to parlay with them, Blake? What can you possibly have to say to one another? Why _now?_ ”

Blake looked up from his communicator—Avon having finally properly caught his excited attention.

He gave Avon a small, sweet smile. Avon felt his breath catch, just a little. Bastard. How did he do it?

“Have you ever heard of the Christmas Truce?”

Avon shook his head. He didn’t say anything—if he did, he might ruin it, and Blake might stop looking touched.

“Centuries ago, in the midst of a war which incurred some of the worst carnage the world had yet seen, soldiers in trenches a little like these decided they weren’t necessarily all that invested in the mercantile and diplomatic interests that had brought about the conflict. It was Christmas—the first Christmas of that war—and they put down their guns and arranged an armistice. They played football—that’s a sort of—well it was a game, and they ate together, and they managed to uphold a truce. They even gave each other gifts. They mostly couldn’t speak the same language. One side was primarily German, like I think our friend out there must be, by way of the colonies.”

“Yes,” Avon said, “I thought she had an accent.”

Blake nodded. “The other was primarily British, like you and I. Ancestrally, at least. And they _still managed_. I _think_ that in some places the truce stretched on until Epiphany.”

“Until they—realized it couldn’t last?” Avon asked.

“That’s in January,” Blake explained, “it’s—Epiphany was a religiously significant day, it’s not just a word for a revelation. I should have realized Traub shared my educational background—digging under the tunnels like that is an old trick, but she’d anticipated it. That was either unusual foresight or unusual hindsight, on her part.”

“And you think she wants to—what, stage a reenactment?” Avon asked, cautious.

“This truce,” Blake said slowly, “was bloody astounding. A literal miracle. If only for a moment, it _was_. People put down their guns and respected the day, and each other, respected in one another what goodness is meted out to mortal men. Silent Night, that song—it’s one of the only carols with a common melody, with both German and English versions. That’s why they sang it together, then. What are the chances we both knew it? What are the chances we both knew _any_ of this? I’m not going to spit in the face of that extraordinary luck. I don’t believe in providence or God, but I believe in people, and I _believe_ we can do this. We’ll have to work out how to manage it, but I want this truce. We need this, all our people _need_ this.”

There were the beginnings of a determined hope on his face, and Avon tried to sort our which of the host of clamoring voices inside him he should pay attention to when formulating his response. God he wanted Blake to be happy: wanted him to shine with it. And _yes_ he wanted it because Blake, happy and restored to himself, would be generous with him, would possibly remember how to love him. But mostly he wanted it because Blake’s happiness was a good unto itself.

He was sorry that he was going to have to rip into Blake’s nascent joy and tear it to shreds: Blake had seldom said something so ludicrously optimistic. It was out of touch with all reality. If people had venerated this religious holiday in the past, and had had some dim memory, then, of gentlemanly codes of war, they didn’t anymore: you couldn’t reconstruct that ex nihilo, you couldn’t ever go home again.

And a slight, horrible part of Avon thought, how dare this fix you? How _dare_ you need _this_ , when you won’t even let _me_ try? You and some random Federation officer can share references and meaning and this little miracle of yours, and you and I can barely speak. I _love_ _you_ , she doesn’t even _know_ you.

“This is an obvious trap, staged by people with complete access to your psychological profile, designed to take what’s best in you and murder you with it,” Avon said. “And all your followers in the bargain.”

Blake’s expression shuttered, and Avon’s stomach lurched. Come back, he thought idiotically. But he couldn’t say he hadn’t meant it.

“Why _now?_ ” Blake asked. “Why wait to exploit my psychological profile at all until _now?_ Yes, this time of the year is suitable for exploiting _this_ weakness. Yes, a good psychostrategist might have pulled this off. But if, despite the destruction of Star One, they happened to have remote access to my intact personal history, and if, despite their scattered forces and the purges of their own intelligentsia after the attempted coups on Earth, they happened to have access to a good psychostrategist, why have they waited all the months you and I have been here, during which we know they’ve received no reinforcements, to do _anything_ that belies that? Why have they endured the casualties they have in the meantime?”

Avon didn’t have a good answer to that. “Suppose the offer is genuine. It is nevertheless dangerous. You’re actually talking about mingling with these people—trained killers—”

“Conscripts, at this point,” Blake shouted, losing his temper. “Stupid, scared children forced to be here. I _know_ what I’ve been killing, Avon.”

“Some of them,” Avon agreed, “but stupid children make mistakes, or are ‘inspired’ by patriotism or ambition, just the same. And there are career officers in among them, we know that. What we _don’t_ know is perhaps more worth fearing—just because we haven’t seen crimmos and programmed mutoids doesn’t mean they are absent.”

“You’ve been overly cautious before,” Blake reminded him, referring, Avon supposed, to the incident, last month, when Blake had wanted to mount a rescue mission for rebel victims of a poison gas attack, trapped in a hollow (along with the gathering, pooling gas). There were two types of this gas, and one of them ate right through the Rebels’ shoddy protective masks. The other only caused light, reparable harm, provided you had the mask on. Blake had wanted to take the gamble that the Federation had exhausted their supplies of the more lethal variety. Had even talked about heading up the recovery effort. Avon had brutally argued him down.

Avon had been right about risk assessment, numbers, and whether they could afford to lose a recovery team. Blake had been right about the type of gas they’d employed. The trapped people had died. It had been Avon’s call, and Avon’s argument, and Blake had accepted it. He hadn’t blamed Avon, but he had been bitterly unhappy afterwards. Avon thought he’d gone to drink alone, and when he came back he said nothing. He collapsed into bed like he was dead, or wanted to be.

“ _Yes_ ,” Avon said, “even as you have been incautious, before.” The Central Control raid didn’t need to be explicitly mentioned. Nor was it the only example of a time when Blake’s trust in the universe had been misplaced.

“This is a cheap appropriation of something you care about,” Avon tried, reframing safety as aesthetics in case that appealed to Blake more strongly. “That is what people are like, Blake. That is what people _do_. How long did it take them to use this magical moment of transcendent accord to sell biscuits?”

Blake regarded him coldly. “The example I remember is from a hundred years on. And it was groceries. And fuck you, Avon,” he said quite calmly, “for being unable to refrain from shitting on anything I value. And for assuming I don’t _know_ that.”

“You weren’t acting as though you did,” Avon said, even as he thought, of course Blake knew what people did with memory and power and sentiment. No one had reason to know it better. People did it to Blake, coercively; it was the substance of politics, which Blake breathed; Blake did it himself, on instinct—though he led you by the heart rather than prodding you with an interrogator’s pain-stick. Avon knew which had given him the more lasting scars. He had to admire Blake’s technique.

“I lost any naïveté I had before we even met,” Blake said. “Sometimes it’s so obvious you think I’m an idiot that I don’t know why you stay. I don’t particularly want you to, on those terms.”

Avon felt the panicked roil that Blake’s talk of leaving always summoned up in him. Wondered, not for the first time, if this was something like how Blake had felt when he’d brought it up on the Liberator.

“I’m only telling you what you need to hear,” Avon managed to get out. “If you can’t or won’t think this through yourself, then I—”

“I don’t actually need a devil’s advocate, Avon. I’m _not_ an idiot, whatever you think. I got on fine before and after you were in my life—for a given value of fine. As well as you did, anyway. I didn’t get shot in your _absence,_ at any rate.”

In the year since the shooting, they had only spoken about it on three occasions. In the hospital room Blake had recovered in, directly after he’d woken up from his coma, they’d discussed Blake’s health. They’d had a quite formal, logistical conversation about how to represent the misunderstanding, when people (inevitably) heard rumors. They’d talked about it as though it were something that had happened to other people.

Then, after Avon had thought everything settled, that everything went without saying, it had become obvious that it wasn’t and did not. There had been one other fight about the matter, during which Avon had said he wouldn’t bring up the subject again—it was Blake’s, to work through or to let alone.

This remark was the fourth time the subject had even been alluded to between them, and the shock of it wrenched Avon’s mouth open.

Blake had backed away, before, when he could tell he’d gone too far. But he was residually furious with Avon, and before Avon could speak, Deva and Soolin came into the command bunker.

“The tech team doesn’t know what you mean,” Deva told Avon.

“Surprise, surprise,” Avon murmured, looking away from Blake.

“Do you want obvious firepower, or discretion?” Soolin asked Blake, hefting a nigh-invisible, thin, clear plastic assassin’s gun in her left hand and something capable of taking out a city block, which looked it, in her right.

“Choices, choices,” Blake said briskly, giving her a professional smile. “What do you think, Soolin?”

“This,” she gestured with her left hand, “at the ready, and this,” she gestured with her right, “beside me, not visible. I’m a quick enough draw, if we need it.”

“We need to start thinking about the truce arrangements,” Blake said to Avon.

Avon’s face tightened. “If you are decided on it.”

“I am,” Blake said, unwavering, glaring him down.

Soolin and Deva shared a look at the obvious tension in the room.

“I’m almost certain Traub is about to extend us a rather unusual offer of truce.” Blake told the two of them. “I intend, with all due caution,” he glanced at Avon, then back at the others, “to accept.”

***

“You don’t say much, on these occasions,” Avon remarked dryly, a week after they’d moved in together.

Three days after they’d first slept together, Blake had suggested that Avon could properly share his room. This suited Avon, who had not managed to stop himself from coming and staying the following night, and who had only _just_ managed to spend an uncomfortable, solitary night in his own room the next day. (Don’t look pathetic, he’d reminded himself, staring up at the ceiling of his own room. Don’t look so desperate, don’t ruin this, don’t scare him off by showing exactly how much you need to be able to touch him.)

The Rebels needed all the space they could get, given the amount of recruits they processed here before sending them out to join up with various fleets and outposts—Blake having, in Avon’s absence, created an umbrella organization that encompassed Avalon and other divisional commanders working on her scale. Blake didn’t ever deny they were sleeping together—someone had said something incredulous about the room arrangements, in light of the incident, and Blake had responded “that’s really none of your business, is it?”

That had shut up certain detractors, but spurred plenty of gossip. Gossip Blake didn’t shut down. They were an item, Blake-and-Avon. Within a day of that conversation everyone knew that: some people thought they always had been. Blake certainly didn’t morning-after-regret him or anything cowardly and beneath him like that. In fact Deva had tested out the phrase ‘your partner’ quite carefully, and Blake hadn’t even blinked. These acknowledgements had meant a great deal to Avon.

Later, Avon wondered how the hell it had taken him so long to notice, despite these marks of favor, that something was very wrong.

Avon had seen, in the invitation, a formalizing of their relations. He was enjoying Blake on a near-nightly basis at present. He couldn’t get enough of Blake, but Blake was still weak, recovering. That, Avon had concluded, was why there was sometimes an element of submission in his response to Avon’s desire. Why he didn’t instigate this as often as Avon did.

He leaned over to unbutton Blake’s jacket, but Blake brushed his hands aside and did it himself. All right, so long as the goal was accomplished in the end. But Avon would have liked to do it.

“I wouldn’t have thought you considered it an occasion for conversation,” Blake said.

Avon shrugged. Not with just anyone, certainly, but he’d welcome it, from Blake. It would license him to be ridiculous in turn. Hadn’t they earned it? _Years_ apart, and they’d both been through more than enough in the way of misfortune. He wanted to dote, just a little, but for that he needed permission.

“I understand who I’m sleeping with,” Avon said with a smile. “You’re not content if you can’t tell the world how you feel about everything. I don’t expect you to be other than yourself. You can be crass or treacley or whatever you like. I don’t mind at all.”

Blake stopped undressing to look at him, puzzled. He snorted. “Fancy _you_ wanting sentiment out of me.”

“Pardon?” Avon asked, confused.

Blake rolled his eyes. “You’re not one for emotional displays, generally. Besides, the last time we were here I said I was emotionally invested and you dropped me. I’m surprised you’re prepared to tolerate it now.”

Ah. He should have guessed he’d hurt Blake there. Stupid not to think of it.

“I was an idiot,” Avon said crisply. “It wasn’t a matter of whether I wanted that from you—I knew that I did. I just wasn’t prepared to take the risks involved. Physical or emotional.”

Blake raised an eyebrow at him. “And now you are?”

“As you see, both were inevitable. You understood the situation better.” Avon grinned. “You were right, Blake. Enjoy that.”

“Lucky me,” Blake said in a droll tone. “I had assumed you simply weren’t that keen on me.”

By now, Blake must have been disabused of that particular ridiculous belief. “I’d be happy to demonstrate exactly how keen my interest is,” Avon said, pulling Blake down to the bed.

Blake didn’t exactly cover him in endearments, though Avon worked hard to pull them out of him, fucking Blake luxuriously and letting Blake see exactly how good it was for him. But Blake did curse, just a little, and he did sigh, and he did look at Avon with a heavy, lusting, wrecked gaze before squeezing his eyes shut, and Avon thought they were getting somewhere.

“So that’s the point settled,” Avon said contentedly, after, and Blake snorted.

He realized soon after that it wasn’t: that for Blake, that old wound hadn’t been the present problem. Was hardly material, anymore. It was the fresh wound that troubled him now.

Avon surprised himself by needing to hear it. Blake had fucked him soundly. It had been the first time they’d tried that, and Avon had thought, this is my favorite. He’d loved everything they’d done thus far, and he’d saved this one, suspecting it might be. Better even than how it felt (and he knew he’d pant after Blake like a dog for it, given how _very_ good it felt) was how mindless it made Blake. The way Blake kissed him with sloppy desperation during, kissed him like he _had_ to. On his back, with his arms and legs wrapped around Blake, Blake’s cock and tongue in him, _filled_ with Blake—it was _perfect_. Blake, to Avon's surprise, had hitherto not been much for kissing.

He’d shifted toward Blake, after, and frowned slightly when Blake didn’t move to accommodate him. What he wanted was for Blake to pull him to him, and then to rest his head on Blake’s chest. It was stupid, he wasn’t going to _ask_ for it, but it annoyed him that he couldn’t get at Blake properly, like this. Blake had a way of holding himself off, aloof, in bed that puzzled Avon. It seemed unlike him. Of the two of them, Blake generally had far fewer hang-ups of that ilk.

He wanted that physical comfort, and he wanted (even though they were _here_ , doing this, so obviously he _knew_ ) to be reassured that Blake understood he hadn’t meant to do it. To know Blake felt safe with him. Trusted him, still. It was important that Blake _knew_ he was loved. Avon thought he must, but felt a responsibility to ensure that. Whose was it, if not his? And hadn’t Blake done as much for him, in publicly letting it be known that Avon was his partner, when he might as easily have hedged?

“You know it was a mistake, Blake? A stupid mistake,” Avon said quietly.

“Obviously,” Blake said, sounding annoyed.

“And you forgive me, don’t you?” Avon asked, stroking his arm.

Blake moved it away from him. “We’ve said all that. It’s done.”

A subtle feeling that something was off, wrong, suddenly crystalized for Avon, like a discordant note.

“Oh, Avon breathed. He sat up. “Oh but you _don’t_.”

“Well what do you want?” Blake asked, low anger in his voice. “Intellectually, I do. I understand it was my own stupid fault as much as anything. Satisfied?”

“No,” Avon hissed, because Blake blaming himself, apportioning some of his anger and hatred to himself, wasn’t what he fucking wanted.

“Emotionally,” Blake continued, “it’s going to take time. If it ever happens. I can’t promise you I’ll get over this.”

“I thought you had,” Avon insisted.

“How?” Blake asked, succinctly.

Avon gave him a look that essentially said ‘I still have your come inside me, and thus I thought we might be on good terms’.

Blake rubbed his face with his hands. “I’m sorry I didn’t go into all this. I didn’t think you cared.” Avon felt that like a slap, but Blake continued.

“But if you’re interested, if _this_ disclosure won’t cause you to run screaming,” (how, Avon seethed, could Blake _think_ he would _ever_ leave him again? How could Blake think he’d even be capable of _surviving_ that?) “I suppose I do still love you, for whatever that’s worth.”

Still. As though he’d ever bloody said _that_ in the first place.

“I just don’t know if that can fix anything, anymore.” Blake shook his head. Looked exhausted. “I used to put an outsize store of faith in that kind of thing. Now that seems rather naïve.” Blake snorted humorlessly.

“I don’t know, Avon. All I feel anymore is—muted and hurt and _tired_. It’s been a long war. And I won’t lie to you, this took a lot out of me. I wasn’t expecting it.” Blake looked at nothing, but intently. So _sad_. As though he might cry. Avon had seen Blake near tears because he was _furious_ , but never because he was wretched. “So I don’t expect to ever get better, per se.” Blake made an ironic gesture with his hand. “I think this is normal, now. I suppose it’s more realistic. More your sort of thing, I’d have thought.”

 _I suppose I do still love you, for whatever that’s worth._ It was worth a great deal to Avon. He grabbed Blake’s hand with his own, gripping tight. Willing Blake to feel. “I love you,” Avon said through gritted teeth. Blake blinked, seeming _surprised_ by that information. Avon continued. “To the point of stupidity and past it. I _love you_ , Blake. What the _hell_ is that?”

He’d said the last in response to Blake’s very faint, amused smile, which reminded him unpleasantly of one of his own.

“Well,” Blake said, marshaling his features back in line, “I don’t—exactly believe you, Avon.”

“Why would I lie about that?” Avon asked, horror making his voice flat. “What could I _possibly_ gain?”

“I don’t think you’re lying,” Blake said, “I just don’t really believe you mean it in… any meaningful way. In any way that matters. You tried to kill me a month ago, after believing I’d become a despicable traitor who’d murder you for a bit of cash while your back was turned. I think I’m making a fair assumption. What kind of love is that, to have _that_ little faith in me?”

“There are things,” Avon said slowly, “you don’t understand, about the years you were gone.”

“Do any of them mean that what I think happened to me didn’t actually happen?” Blake glanced theatrically down at his scarred torso. “Hm. Apparently not.”

“God _dammit_ , Blake,” Avon said.

“And even before then, all you wanted was the Liberator, and ‘to be free of me.’”

He actually mocked Avon’s pronunciation, there, and Avon stared at him, aghast.

“Look. I’m _sorry_ ,” Blake said, and he did sound it. “Pointless to bring it up. I _do_ believe it was a misunderstanding, Avon. You were under a lot of stress. I know all that.”

“But you _don’t_ believe I love you?” Avon said, keeping his tone mocking and caustic to hide how desperate he was.

Blake pulled a face. “I think you do care about me, and that that’s something. I don’t know that it ultimately makes much of a difference, but if it’s important to you, then yes, I’ll trust your evaluation of your own feelings.”

Avon seized Blake’s shoulders, his fingers tightening, digging into Blake. “No, Blake—Blake you _have_ to forgive me. You _must_ understand.” How could Blake feel safe with him, like this? How could he trust anyone if he didn’t trust Avon? How was Blake ever to be content and himself again, and how was Avon to live with himself? Blake had never once _felt_ that Avon loved him. Might never believe it.

“Why?” Blake asked, pulling back from him (Avon wondered with a sudden flare of fresh panic whether he was hurting Blake, frightening him, when Blake had good reason to fear Avon’s demonstrations of excessive emotion). “Because you need to be absolved? Avon, I’m not a machine that dispenses emotional responses at will, on your schedule. I don’t feel so you can get on with the thinking. I don’t even know how to go about making myself feel something, I couldn’t give you that if I wanted to. And I don’t know that I want to, frankly—my emotions are my own, and I’ve some right to them, even when they’re not entirely logical.” Blake sighed. “I’ve said I _do_ understand. It was ridiculous to think that you’d still know me better than that. I know it was.”

“That isn’t enough,” Avon said desperately.

Blake snorted, lying down and rolling over. “Well it’s all I have. Take it or leave it.” That, then, was an invitation to sleep elsewhere. Like hell. This was his room. Blake was _his_ partner. Blake _loved him_. He wasn’t going to take Blake up on it and turn an argument into a separation: the implication being that Blake wouldn’t even fight for this. Avon would fix this, even if the situation was more awful than he’d imagined it could be. He wished Blake would stab him for parity’s sake and get this business over with.

Now there was an idea.

***

“You must be Kerr Avon,” Commander Traub said, sticking out her hand to shake his.

“That’s right,” Avon said, smiling too fixedly for politeness as he completed the gesture.

“Your General tells me that _you_ believe you will all be murdered in your beds,” she said with a slight smile.

Avon wondered exactly how angry Blake would be to be called a General. Very, probably. “You’ll find my partner has all the finer qualities, between us. The boundless faith in human nature is all on his side.”

This, Avon hoped, would imply several things. First, that Blake had all the mercy, too, and that if anything happened to him, Avon would see everyone even tangentially responsible reduced to ashes. Second, that Blake was his partner. All the chummy politeness and mutual understanding between the two commanders could stay right there: at civility. Blake was taken. Nightly, if Avon had anything to say about it.

His concern was ludicrous, and he knew it. Blake wasn’t reckless or flighty enough to seriously consider a fling with a _Federation commander_ , no matter how genteel. Blake wouldn’t do anything of the kind, either to Avon or to himself. Would never make both himself and Avon ridiculous in that manner. If Blake wanted out for whatever reason, there would be a quite formal parting of the ways Avon would see coming, and a fleeting attraction wouldn’t enter into it. Besides, he hoped and trusted that Blake knew better than to cheat on him, given his probable reaction. There would be nothing like dignity—he’d make their Star One blowout look like a polite minor difference of opinion.

The truce’s security negotiation, which he, Blake, Deva, Traub, her second and her chief technical officer all embarked on after the introductions had been made, was carried out cooperatively and carefully. Avon was somewhat relieved to find that Blake was taking this very seriously, anticipating his own concerns for the most part, and voicing a few of his own which Avon hadn’t thought of himself.

To the extent that he could judge these things—to the extent such a judgment was valuable—Avon thought Traub seemed genuine. Practical. She was about the same age as he and Blake, wore her long hair braided and tied up in a neat bun, and had a sideways smile and an air of steady competence. She had a habit of laughing, suddenly and unexpectedly, as if it had been surprised out of her—perhaps her lot generally didn’t make her. Blake on the other hand had always preferred close associates with good senses of humor—necessary, Avon would have said, in their inherently ridiculous line of work. Even Deva on occasion got in devastating, dry cracks that caught Avon out. Avon wondered why the hell someone as genuine and practical as Traub seemed to be worked for an institutionally insincere Byzantine shambles like the Federation, but he supposed that wasn’t really his business.

He and Blake corrected each other too sharply in the meeting, and reined themselves in so that their disagreement was less obvious to their opponents.

The truce would begin, officially, the next morning. This morning, really—they’d struggle to catch a few hours’ sleep beforehand. Through the night, the tech teams on both sides would implement the failsafes Avon had worked out during the meeting, which had shifted in answer to the changing parameters of the agreement Blake and Traub were negotiating. Avon had given a copy of his notes to Traub’s tech lead, who’d seemed slightly in awe of him and his rapidly-composed plan. Avon forgot, on occasion, that he was still famous as the technician who’d almost brought down the central bank, who could take out a secure prison ship system in minutes. It was slightly flattering, to be reminded of it. Deva and Traub’s second had worked on codes of conduct, and what would actually be said to the troopers on both sides. Blake had offered a succinct explanation of what they were remembering with the proposed truce, which even Avon had found affecting. Traub had offered to say just that to her troops—she clearly venerated the event in question like Blake did. That, or she put on a very good, subtle show.

Avon supposed he should have been pleased that this didn’t _look_ like a plot. He was, a little—though still very wary. Even the knowledge that he and Blake would be constantly guarded by Dayna and Soolin, in whose competence he put great stock, and that their strategic resources would be off-limits to the Federation troopers, and highly guarded, didn’t fully alleviate that. He was also furious with Blake for ignoring his very valid concern about the wisdom of the enterprise as a whole: for exposing himself to danger and disappointment.

And he was angry that Blake was obviously angry with _him_. What right did he have? Didn’t he see that Avon had been trying to protect him, that _someone_ had needed to say what he’d said? Did Blake think Avon _enjoyed_ puncturing his optimism? For the most part he _didn’t_ , he _wished_ the world worked the way it did in Blake’s best imaginings. Any joy he took in recognizing that it didn’t was a bitter satisfaction, making the best of a bad lot. He _didn’t_ think that Blake was stupid or naïve, obviously he didn’t. And perhaps Blake didn’t need him (painful thought), but someone had to stand between Blake and the world. Or at least—someone should. And that was him.

And how _dare_ Blake bring up the incident like that: as though Avon hadn’t killed himself, that day. As though Blake didn’t know he’d have given anything, done _anything_ to undo that single minute of his life—as though that minute was more important than the weight of _years_ lived for Blake.

Even if Blake didn’t think that was enough, there was still no need to twist the knife.

Anger and self-recrimination were always at war in Avon. Simmering in the back of him, over this. Right now anger was making by far the stronger showing.

“Bed,” he said rather than suggested to Blake, when they retired to their room after the meeting. His tone made it clear they weren’t going to be sleeping yet.

“Aren’t you _tired?_ ” Blake asked. “Besides, we’re not exactly pleased with each other at present.”

“Do I hear a ‘no’?” Avon asked, tersely.

“No,” Blake said shortly. “Let me undress.” He began to methodically unbutton his jacket.

“Oh for god’s sake,” Avon hissed, stepping in to undo it himself, fingers moving quick over the buttons.

“I’m perfectly capable—” Blake began, pushing Avon’s hands away.

Avon caught Blake’s hands in his own. “Shut up,” he said. “ _Let me do this._ ”

With an irate noise, Blake dropped his hands. “ _Fine,_ ” he said.

Blood pounding, Avon undressed Blake. Licked his lips, as though they were simply dry. Blake apparently didn’t understand that Avon _wanted_ to do this. Fine. What he didn’t know Avon loved, he couldn’t keep back from him.

He undressed Blake gently, lingering over it, and then shoved him to the bed roughly and disposed of his own clothing.

Blake watched Avon prepare himself with lidded eyes. It was good. Him watching was _very_ good.

“I suppose I’m not allowed to do that either,” Blake said dryly.

“No,” Avon said crisply, “you’d only take too long.” Mostly he loved how long Blake took—careful not to hurt him. He hoped Blake liked doing it to him, the process of the preliminaries. He _seeme_ d to. Difficult to say. But right now Avon knew what he wanted and he knew when he had to have it, and it was hours ago, over the conference table (preferably before Blake had had time to say horrible things to him, when his eyes were still full of that wonder— _god_ it’d be good if Blake looked at him like that)—but that couldn’t be helped, so it would just have to be as soon as physically possible.

“You’re so rough with yourself,” Blake said, reaching up to still Avon’s hand.

“ _Leave it_ ,” Avon insisted. He didn’t need much work, any more, given that he was very much in practice. It looked to be physically possible right about—now.

He took Blake in, and it didn’t hurt long. Blake was always hard for him when the time came—he made Blake’s blood pump, he knew that much. Soon he was riding Blake with just the determined rhythm he knew Blake loved, because Blake couldn’t hide the glassiness of his eyes before they slipped closed or control his hitched breathing.

“You’re tired,” Avon murmured, “let me do all the work. Let me—” he shut up, because he could see exactly where _that_ was going. Let me take care of this, let me take care of you, let me love you, I love you _so_ much, why can’t you let yourself love me?

It might have calmed him down to say some of that, if he were in the sort of relationship where anything like it came under discussion. He hadn’t, after all, ever bothered to tell Blake that he loved him again. What would have been the point? If Blake didn’t want to hear it, didn’t even _believe_ it, then why repeat himself? If it didn’t please Blake to hear it, then it wouldn’t please Avon to say it.

Besides, it wasn’t as though _Blake_ had ever said as much, outside of the single sideways declaration during an argument and the one time, during another argument, that Avon had prompted him to reiterate it. He’d not even used the words, then. Simply agreed.

And because Avon wasn’t in the sort of relationship where he could say anything like this to Blake, he had no access to the consolation he could have derived from doing so. Being thwarted made him angrier, and he was still seething about the truce, besides.

Avon grabbed Blake’s chin, holding it firm against Blake’s seemingly almost instinctive desire to twist away. He bent to kiss Blake. Did it soundly, panted into his mouth. Blake shivered like he wanted it, and Avon felt his heart clench. He did it again and again. Blake wrenched his head to the side, away from him. Undaunted, refusing to be hurt, Avon licked and bit at Blake’s neck instead. Avon then leaned back and went through the steps, anger fueling his determination.

He’d gotten very good at this. He’d committed the smallest signs to memory, and it wasn’t just sentiment that made him think Blake was the best sex of his hardly abstinent life. Blake might be holding back from him in emotional matters, but in other respects he was as talented and forthcoming in bed as Avon had imagined he would be, back on the Liberator. For his part Avon was good with Blake because he worked at it, devoting all his energy, intelligence, invention, and all the shamelessness he could scrape together to this.

Thus he knew just when to speed up; precisely the swivel of his hips that made Blake groan luxuriantly, despite himself; just the expression of mouthed-parted, heavy-lidded lust on his own face that _forced_ Blake to keep his eyes open. _That’s_ it, he thought, with smug, sinuous triumph, when his gaze caught Blake’s and Blake couldn’t break away, watch me Blake. This is all for you.

That was how Blake liked Avon to softly stroke the side of his face. This was how he liked to watch Avon touch himself, while his own hands were busy on Avon’s back and hips and arse, supporting him, shoving Avon down on himself, his own hips frantically working with the rhythm Avon had set going. Avon applied precisely the right gentle touch to Blake’s nipples: Blake bit his lower lip. Avon let himself make the small pleading, gasping noises that made Blake shake under him.

They were both close, and Avon smiled with immense satisfaction. “No one’s ever going to fuck you like I fuck you,” he leaned down to whisper into Blake’s mouth. No one was going to get the chance. No one would measure up if they did, he made sure of it. He saw to Blake thoroughly. Blake always came extravagantly for him—Avon drained him dry, left him spent, and the closest Avon ever saw him to content, these days. He slept hard, after Avon took him.

He let Blake do the actual business of bringing him off, when they fucked like this. He liked the sudden delightful exchange of his own hand for Blake’s shaking grip, liked coming all over Blake’s hand. This time, when he tightened up with orgasm, Blake snarled and rolled them over. Leaving Blake to balance on one elbow, Avon brought Blake’s hand to his mouth to suck his own come off Blake’s fingers, moaning like he was desperate for it. Blake’s eyes were black and intense with want. He loved Avon’s tongue anywhere, but he shoved his fingers into Avon’s mouth to suck before he worked him open (while Avon stared up at him, large-eyed, and let Blake slide the fingers slowly in and out of his mouth, catching on the plump lower lip) with a special relish. Avon had _thought_ he’d like this, and oh _yes_ he did.

Blake pounded a few times into Avon’s shuddering body. Avon threw his arms around Blake’s neck for balance and let himself go rag-doll limp. He loved the pressure, making his orgasm and its aftermath long and sweet and painful. Loved how Blake growled and smashed their mouths together when he whimpered. Loved the way Blake’s whole back arched when he came like this, the way he cursed fuck, _Av’n_ , fuck into Avon’s mouth.

Blake collapsed on him after, breathing hard. Avon wriggled under him, relishing the weight, hoping he wouldn’t move.

After a moment (not as long a moment as Avon wanted), Blake pushed off him and settled on his back.

“Are you—” Blake said after a moment, then stopped.

“Yes?” Avon asked cautiously, getting his breath back.

“Have you got that out of your system, now?” Blake asked. His voice had been uncharacteristically tentative before, but this was delivered quite coolly.

“No,” Avon said sharply, inwardly rocketing right back to rage. Out of his _system?_ Like he was having a _temper tantrum?_ Yes, he’d been displeased that Traub had gotten on with Blake. Had made him, with her offer, happier than Avon had managed to in years. Yes, he’d fucked Blake after all that to sink his talons in, to curl himself around the core of Blake, to be the one in control of Blake’s emotions. To remind Blake who pleased his body, if not his spirit.

But that didn’t mean he didn’t have real, valid concerns—when the _fuck_ had he _ever_ given Blake less than the unyielding, honest criticism Blake needed to survive? How was he _supposed_ to entirely divorce his own emotions from this, supposed to remain free of all partiality, free of any hint of waspishness? He couldn’t turn off fear, for Blake and himself. He couldn’t shut down his anger entirely. How could Blake expect that of him? _Blake_ was never so impartial. Blake had never made the common mistake of thinking Avon robotic. They both understood how far that was from the truth, whatever Avon might have liked his emotional control to have been. Why the _hell_ did Blake think it likely that Avon was just being vicious for the sake of it? Why did Blake see pure malice lurking in everything he said? God _dammit,_ what was he supposed to _do_ to demonstrate fidelity if not _all of this?_

An awkward silence lapsed between then.

“Bad choice of words,” Blake admitted. The apology didn’t mollify Avon, who sat in silence and seethed.

God, maybe he should back off, if he just made Blake miserable. If he kept him from healing, if the sight of him kept reopening the wound. But he didn’t know that he could make himself go, even if it was in Blake’s best interest. If Blake tossed him aside he expected he’d beg shamelessly to stay. And he didn’t think Blake _would_ be better off without him. Avon had saved his life twice in the past year—Blake had saved his once. They were good for each other, Avon had always believed that. He knew it was what he wanted to think, but he did honestly believe that Blake was simply unhappy, and therefore that leaving Blake would either not help, or would pain Blake more.

“We should sleep,” Blake continued. “Tomorrow’s going to be—”

“Demanding,” Avon agreed with a patronizing sneer, switching off the light.

Blake, as he always did after sex at night, fell asleep soundly, and slept seemingly dreamlessly. Or peacefully, at any rate.

Avon had a harder time of it, distracted by a jangle of thoughts. Eventually the racing litany—idiotic petty oblivious son of a _bitch_ , we’ll see who’s laughing when he gets himself killed, god knows I won’t be, should have taken him instead, should have fucked that brooding sullen petulance right out of him, god it hurts, god I’m tired, god I’m horrifyingly alone, how _dare_ he say that to _me,_ right _then_ , when I’d given him everything and all I wanted was to lie next to him and maybe, if it was a particularly good night, if fearless leader was feeling _generous_ , for him to run his hands over me after—subsided.

Taking in and releasing a deep breath, Avon ran back over their argument in the command center. Perhaps he had thought Blake a little naïve. Perhaps he had been an absolute idiot. Blake’s commitments were the product of consideration, had been borne through suffering. Blake’s hope was hard won. He understood that.

Blake was Blake. Infuriating and determined and brilliant and vulnerable. Blake drew people to him, and some of them loved him, and some of them wanted to hurt him. He himself had fallen into both categories, at times. All the more reason for him to make sure no one else with dubious intentions got close enough to hurt Blake ever again.

He rolled over and watched Blake sleep. Years ago, he’d wanted to run away with Anna, to take her somewhere they could be perfectly safe. So rich no one could touch them. It was a stupid dream, because Blake was braver and better than Anna, and wouldn’t abandon the world, even in the face of so much evidence of how little it valued and deserved him.

But for a stupid moment on the cusp of sleep, Avon wanted to put Blake on a high shelf where he couldn’t be broken. To reserve him for a special occasion, to tuck him away like Sunday-best. In a fortress-tower on a distant asteroid, Blake would never have to endure anything so awful as disappointed hope. Wouldn’t have to live in fear in a trench and torture himself with the thought of getting children killed while ordering the deaths of other children. They could work at something else, or just waste the days luxuriantly. Could dine on caviar rather than field rations, and wear things that would show dirt and blood, but which they never had to worry about ruining. He’d get to meet whoever Blake was when he was really, properly secure and content. And being with Blake, and touching him whenever and however he liked, Avon would think a luxury equal to any wealth could afford him.

And even having grown a great deal in the years since then, if Blake had turned to him now and said that he knew what Avon was thinking, and his answer was yes, in that moment Avon would have set it up without compunction.

***

Another month passed as Avon continued to work towards his goal. Blake needed time, and he’d get it. Avon would admit that that was reasonable, that he owed Blake that much. While he was brooding, Avon would simply demonstrate, again and again, as often as necessary, the sincerity of both his declarations and his contrition. Blake didn’t want to discuss it? That was just _fine_. Avon would benefit Blake’s rebellion, spectacularly. That was currency Blake would understand. A favor to his cause, Blake couldn’t overlook. Blake would be _forced_ to see.

One night, Blake had been exceptionally gentle with him. Solicitous. Determined to do whatever he wanted, almost frighteningly so. Choking on his cock and then taking him, soft as a whisper at first and then harder, and harder still, until it was almost past bearing, until the fuck was a battering that must have exhausted him even as it made Avon struggle for breath and whimper raggedly when Blake kissed him, again and again, and came in him—he loved Blake coming in him, and Blake must have seen it.

Ten credits says, Avon thought as Blake clutched him after, deigning to stroke him as though he were afraid of something hurting him, that someone told him about what happened on Earth. He tightened his arms around Blake, setting his jaw. Well. He’d take it. It wouldn’t last long, but he wasn’t above Blake’s pity.

And sure enough, the next day, Dayna gave Avon a quick, guilty look, and her eyes slid away from his.

“Dayna,” Avon said with an unpleasant smile, “I know you’re a little—shall we say dazzled by Blake, but try and keep the jaunts down memory lane to a minimum. If I wanted Blake to know something about my life, I would tell him.”

Dayna looked uncomfortable—rare, for her.

Avon carried out three spectacularly successful raids on Pylene manufacturing bases. On the fourth, while Blake was off negotiating with the warlords, Avon very nearly got himself killed. Avon had intimated that Blake shouldn’t be told exactly how close the call had been. Vila hadn’t given a damn.

“You should have pulled out,” Blake half shouted at him, walking into his own office (which Avon was working out of—he often did, but he nonetheless thought of it as Blake’s Office).

“Hello, Blake,” Avon mocked. “Welcome back, Blake. Yes, I did take that base for you, Blake. You’re quite welcome, Blake—and how did _your_ affairs fall out?”

“Fine,” Blake snapped, refusing to be shifted. “We can take these installations slowly—you’re not a renewable resource.”

Avon stiffened. “I can handle myself. It’s hardly your—”

“You’re my second and my tech lead, and as such I need you for more than canon fodder,” Blake interrupted him. “You took a pointless, idiotic risk, and I’m not sure why. I already told you I’ve no use for your guilt. Don’t let it happen again.” He might have manipulated Avon into doing whatever it was he wanted here, into doing anything, he was _good_ at that. He wasn’t even bothering, of late.

Blake left as though there was nothing more to say. The door slammed behind him.

Remember when he thought he’d lost Cally, through carelessness, Avon told himself. Blake is brutal when he’s worried. When he’s angry with himself. He’s worried for you. This is love.

Well, so was his, wasn’t it?

“All right,” he said, hours later, coming into their bedroom to find Blake alone there, sitting on their bed. It didn’t seem to be in the cards now, but he’d hoped for sex tonight. They’d been apart for a week, and there had been no assurance this would go well for Blake. There was no other pretext for companionship: just sex and work, cathected such that a supply inventory was a love letter, and carrying out a mission for Blake was an act of fealty. “I will refrain from being incautious in future. But you’ll have to tell me what you do want.”

Blake raised an eyebrow at him.

Annoyed that Blake was pretending ignorance, when he must know what Avon was after, and feeling on-edge about being forced to articulate this, Avon swallowed.

“Tell me what to do,” he said, relived his voice didn’t audibly crack. “I will do anything, Blake. Almost literally anything. But you have to tell me, and say—say then, it _will_ be all right. Or at least,” Avon felt like he was stumbling, “that we will be moving _towards_ that—”

Blake buried his face in his hands. “Oh for god’s sake,” he muttered, angry.

Avon stood stock-still.

“I said I didn’t know if it _would_ be, Avon. I _told you that._ God, under everything, you have this child-like faith that the universe runs according to some standards of accountability. That you can balance things out. You’re all guilt and promises. Well it _doesn’t_ and sometimes you _can’t_ and I don’t want any promises from _you_. Some of us had to give up that kind of belief a long time ago.”

Maybe he doesn’t know what it is, Avon thought, with persistent, numb stupidity. Maybe he doesn’t _know_ what he wants me to do.

Blake gave him a lingering look, and continued.

“It should be obvious, but since it apparently isn't—” Blake sighed, long and low. “There is nothing in the world you can _do_ to make me feel better. There is absolutely no way you can fix this.” Blake passed a hand through his hair, then shook his head.

“Part of it’s not even you—I’m depressed and I can’t shake it. Why shouldn’t I be? There isn’t much to be delighted about at present, and being an exile has worn on me. And all the rest.” Blake twisted his head away, not facing Avon.

“All you can do, all _I_ can do, is just live through it. Do that here or somewhere else, if you need to. Here makes more logistical sense.”

“I am _not leaving_ ,” Avon hissed. Was this punishment for having threatened to do that so often, when they’d first known one another? Blake wasn’t stupid, so he must have understood that what he was suggesting was absolutely impossible.

“Then leave off the foolhardy heroics,” Blake said shortly. “They don’t suit you and they don’t help anything.”

I have ruined entirely, Avon thought with great clarity, the only really, properly good thing in my entire life. Anna was a lie, and my old ambitions were facile and impossible, but Blake believed in me and loved me so much that the ghost of it is still in him. And I spoilt it. Not just by shooting him in a moment's frenzy, but by being myself. By rejecting every chance to build a stronger trust between us, that nothing could have shaken. Not my madness, not my stars: the fault was in me.

“I’m going to sleep somewhere else tonight,” Avon said, and Blake gave him a wary, unsurprised look, like ultimately he’d known, protestations aside, that Avon would run. It’d hurt Blake, but not like a wound he hadn’t prepared for. Avon wanted to _slap_ him or comfort him or cry.

“Oh no, you’re not _that_ lucky,” Avon smiled grimly, no humor in it. “I’m coming back tomorrow. We won’t talk about this again—unless you should bring it up.”

Blake didn’t look as though that was likely, tomorrow or ever.

“And you ‘love me’, do you,” Avon murmured bitterly, wishing he hadn’t said it, even as it was slipping out of his mouth.

“I told you I did,” Blake said, starring off into the middle distance, clearly not wanting to discuss that any further. For just that reason, Avon was perversely driven to make him. To hurt them both in doing it.

“You never said, before.”

“I tried to.”

Even then, Avon thought with awful wonder, realizing precisely when Blake meant. Even _then_ , Blake knew what he wanted, while I thrashed about trying to frame the thing as ‘admiration’.

Blake actually smiled at him. How long had it been, since he’d seen Blake properly smile? But even this melancholy approximation of the expression was rather beautiful.

Obviously being asked questions he didn’t want to answer had spurred in Blake a corresponding hurtful desire to give Avon exactly what he asked for. “How did the old song go? ‘So this is the miracle, that I’ve been dreaming of’.” He didn’t sing it, but his voice had the cadence of a song. “Do you want me to admit it? You’re the love of my life, probably. I’ve found romance not quite the panacea the vizzes promised. The miracle somewhat over-rated. We could _eat_ loaves and fishes.”

You could eat my heart, if you wanted sustenance, Avon thought. If you wanted or needed it, if you’d take it. I’d give it gladly. Your teeth in me would surely feel better than this.

“I’ll leave you to contemplate our supply line issues,” Avon said, turning to go. “We’ll discuss your treaty expedition tomorrow morning.”

Avon had walked through the base calmly, as though he were just working late or getting something from the kitchens. No one who saw him should think anything of it. He waited for the hallway to clear before knocking on one of the doors

“Fight,” he’d told Jenna shortly, barging into her room when she blearily said ‘come?’ from the bed. “Roll over.” Beds weren’t so abundantly available that Avon could easily demand a spare room for the evening, and he didn’t want to cause that kind of gossip. Jenna had just come in from a long-haul. She tended to bed people opportunistically, off-base if she could possibly help it—didn’t really believe in shitting where she lived. Thus he’d reasoned that she would probably be sleeping alone at present.

Rolling her eyes and muttering “oh for god’s sake,” Jenna scooted grudgingly, making room for Avon.

“Is this going to happen often?” she murmured sleepily.

“Are Blake and I going to fight often?” Avon asked, seeking clarification.

“Fuck,” Jenna said into a pillow. “I’ll invest in a cot.”

“That won’t be necessary,” Avon said crisply, apportioning half the duvet to himself. And it wasn’t. Avon hadn’t yielded the field again.

When the next round of Pylene missions took Avon off on a campaign of long, back-to-back engagements, he had a short practical discussion with Blake.

“Out of curiosity,” he said as he packed, “given that we can expect to be separated for some time, do you intend to remain monogamous? It isn’t a problem, for me. By which I mean—I very much doubt that I’ll have time for or interest in alternative entertainment.

Blake gave him a long, hard look. It hadn’t occurred to Avon that Blake would be angry—he’d mostly been asking because he couldn’t help doing it. Because the thought had tortured him. But now, seeing Blake’s response, he felt a rush of adrenaline. Yes, he thought, yes be furious with me again. Feel something, feel it for me. Shout at me until you crack and cry and you are better, _we_ are better.

“I’m not going to fuck around on you,” Blake said curtly. Tone cold. “And I don’t ask anything of you that you don’t want to give.”

Unfairly (he knew it), that made _Avon_ furious. “I told you I wouldn’t,” he bit out, not saying that he didn’t _want_ anyone but Blake. That Blake should trust him absolutely. From the very beginning, he’d said once—Avon loved the memory of it. Fondled it pornographically. He’d been an absolute bastard, early on, more so even than usual—he’d been unused to sustained stresses, then. And even so, Blake had seen in him—Blake had overlooked, Blake had forgiven—which meant he could do it again. He might one day turn to Avon, and there would be no banked fear or awful resignation in his eyes. He’d say he loved Avon like it wasn’t a cruel cosmic joke, an irony foisted upon him. He’d try (was he _trying_ to move past this, trying at _all?_ ), and he’d let Avon try.

“Fine,” Blake said. Then he cleared that (promising, seductive) hint of anger out of his voice. “Fine,” Blake repeated, his voice as neutral as if Avon had told him the weather would be tolerable tomorrow. Schooling himself to apathy.

Between the engagements, Avon was back at the relocated base, or with Blake on a command ship in the armada. Those intervals consisted of bursts of needy, harsh, desperate sex and equally intense, compressed planning.

When the situation had gotten properly messy on Sundera, stretching on past projections (though the odds had never been wonderful), Avon had grudgingly called Blake in. ‘Bogged down, could use you’ wasn’t one of history’s great epistles between either lovers or military heroes, but it was short, bare of identifying detail bar its signature frequency, and transmitted easily across subspace. And it brought him Blake, whose presence cheered troops restless under Avon’s proficient, uneasy command. Still, they were holding together under Avon. It seemed he could manage to captain, just about—provided Blake was acting as his commodore.

“Daddy’s home,” Vila had joked under his breath as Blake walked towards them. Avon had given him the sort of smile that reminded Vila of shuttlecrafts and the fact that Avon could be a ruthless bastard, when the mood took him, and that it didn’t do to annoy him unduly.

Alone with Blake, Avon explained the situation at exhaustive length, Blake throwing questions at him like it was an inquisition.

Finally, Blake looked over the command bunker’s great territorial map (a graphic display over the large conference table), flicked it off, and sighed.

“It isn’t your fault, Avon,” he said, gesturing at where the positions had been. “You shut down the rest of the network beautifully, and you’ve done everything possible with this.”

“I know it isn’t,” Avon said, but softly—it helped a great deal, to hear Blake say it.

“I’ll stay and we can figure out if we can make anything of this,” Blake said, and Avon clamped down on a flash of relief and wondered if Blake, too, made excuses. He’d missed Blake—the warm island on the other side of the bed. The feeling of being inside him. The sound of his voice. The feeling that they might win, simply because he was here. Better, militarily, to have Blake here (home, he thought stupidly, good to have him home, and didn’t it just torture him not to know what Blake was doing when he was halfway across the known galaxy, undoubtedly putting himself at risk). Immeasurably better, personally. Even as it was torture to be reminded of how little Blake liked him these days. Even as it was an embarrassment, a proof of incapacity, to have had to call him in.

It was lucky that Blake didn’t want Avon to take out his clemency in deeds. It seemed he couldn’t even manage them.

***

Avon supposed he shouldn’t have been surprised to discover that Blake loved Christmas. That all his living-under-a-totalitarian-state-or-on-the-run life, Blake had been waiting to be the sort of person who bloody loved Christmas, and that this would come bursting out of him in an explosion of boughs of vegetation, goodwill towards all and excessive catering at the first available opportunity.

The catering was a difficult feat to pull off, but then they had an indispensible, expert spiv on their side. Tell Vila to find ground ginger on this unoccupied-but-for-two-poorly-provisioned-armies, blockaded hellhole of a planet, and he came back with a passable equivalent. It didn’t do to ask too many questions about what this powder consisted of, or where and how Vila had acquired it, but ‘ginger’ you’d have, and thus you could bake some kind of biscuit Traub and Blake both thought very important to the celebrations. Blake had finally managed to make a responsible adult out of Vila by just _giving_ him the keys to the drugs cabinet—while also making emphatically clear to Vile how many of the people here were going to die and need these drugs for their final hours or, more hopefully, their recovery. Vila had borne up.

That, Avon thought, was a neat trick of Blake’s. He had made a conscientious quartermaster out of Vila, a dedicated servant out of headstrong Tarrant, and god knew what Blake had made out of him. He resented it, but couldn’t find it in him to entirely despise being Blake’s creature. After all, he liked the man he’d been on the Liberator better than the failed  hacker he’d been before Blake or the desperate, harried man he’d become in Blake’s absence.

“We must either both nobly abstain from the festivities, or throw ourselves equally into them,” Traub had said to Blake as they planned some entertainments for their troops. She had a narrow, cautious smile. Everything about Traub suggested a kind of dogged conscientiousness.

“Abstaining doesn’t sound like any fun,” Blake had pointed out.

“No, indeed,” she’d agreed. “Have you ever played football, Blake?”

“I can’t say that I have,” Blake admitted.

Her smile widened a fraction. “Good. Then I shall have a considerable advantage.”

Avon laughed outright at Deva’s mild suggestion that Avon might get into the spirit of things by participating in the game.

“I’ll spectate,” he said, as though this were a grand concession.

“Will you indeed?” Blake asked. “Going to cheer me on?”

“You have never required an ounce of encouragement,” Avon said.

They used the no man’s land as their field, and while teams were split along expected lines, the fair crowd of spectators was more mixed.

The Federation team did win—though the Rebel team seemed to have more fun, and no one could say Blake hadn’t played the game with determination. The goal he’d sneaked past Traub, after faking her out with a series of rapid passes, was the object of both Federation curses and universal acclaim.

“Is trickery rewarded in this game?” Avon asked, when Blake came over to the offside where Avon was parked with work and Soolin, who was guarding both him and Blake, out on the field. Covertly, Avon was also guarding Blake. But it wouldn’t do to announce as much, even (especially) to Blake himself. Dayna had, for the moment, shucked her bodyguard responsibilities to play offense. Tarrant was on the field as well. He’d been relieved by a less capable pilot, but one who _had_ caught a break in the last month.

If trickery _was_ encouraged by the game mechanic, Avon thought he might be more interested than he’d initially supposed. Blake poured himself a glass of the liquid nutrient supplement everyone subsisted off of here.

“You know, I have no idea,” Blake said cheerfully.

“If you were a classical hero, you’d be Ulysses,” Avon said with consideration. Unashamedly cunning—none of Aeneas’s scrupulous primness. The Federation, for reasons Blake had once said weren’t exactly subtle, was very good at imparting classic, imperial history, if rather vague about most of what had happened subsequently.

“In that the Romans don’t like me much and it’s taking me an age to get back home?” Blake asked with half a laugh. The warmth in his attractively flushed face surprised Avon. “You might have a point. How goes the weaving?”

Avon rolled his eyes. Blake seemed to want to pretend that they wouldn’t have a war to get back to, after the truce finished. Someone had to keep things ticking over.

“That’s as good as one of Jenna’s,” Blake said of the expression. “Has she been giving you lessons via correspondence?”

“Incline left eye one centimeter—repeat this exercise until the muscle strengthens,” Avon deadpanned.

Blake favored him with another, somewhat more open laugh. “I always liked Penelope,” he said, after a sip and a moment. “She was clever. Tough.”

Avon wondered whether he should take that as a compliment. It felt like one. His had been. “Telemachus was a something of a disappointment,” he offered, wanting to prolong the exchange.

“So we won’t have children,” Blake agreed. That definitely felt—if it wasn’t precisely a compliment, it was still something Avon wanted out of Blake. But Blake left before he could counter with ‘well now, I didn’t say that’, because it was something he’d never once considered, but he didn’t hate the idea, and if that would make Blake happy he could love it (the idea or a child alike). Misguided straight couples had children to try and fix their relationships all the time—why not them? No, he couldn’t in all conscience contemplate bringing a child into either the world or this relationship, as they stood at present. But Blake had flirted with him, for the first time in an age. It was distinctly heartening.

In the second half, Vila worked out the concept of ‘diving’. Avon found himself laughing hard. Even Soolin seemed to think Vila’s theatrical moans were fairly hilarious.

Avon found the day’s many tête-à-têtes between Blake and Traub less amusing. He was a little horrified to overhear Blake casually telling Traub things he himself didn’t know about Blake’s past. They hadn’t had as much time on the Liberator as he would have liked, and he’d spoiled some of what time they’d had with his own awkwardness, or with his attempts to shut Blake out, during the final months they’d been together. There were things he wanted to tell Blake and never had. Things he’d wanted to ask, points to clarify. He’d hardly heard about Blake’s early life—Blake and Traub both came from large families, and were comparing notes now.

Some of what little he did know of Blake’s family came from Inga, besides. Inga—who Avon had been a little jealous of before he’d realized that she was, essentially, Blake’s sole surviving sibling—seemed a bit politely confused as to whether Avon was effectively her brother in law. She was warm and easy to talk to, and reminded him of Blake, but a Blake he didn’t have enormous tension with and wasn’t desperate just to be near. They got on rather well now, all things considered.

Avon got the sense that Blake was feeling Traub out—trying to work out whether there was any far-fetched possibility of a real accommodation between them. But the work seemed hard going. Traub was a career officer, not very willing to be persuaded over to Blake’s side. Too invested in the years she’d put into her own, Avon suspected. Too compromised by the things she’d done for it to go back on her word now and make them all for nothing. And even _if_ Blake’s family—the family her side had murdered—could serve as a bridge between them, a selfish sliver of Avon still wanted Blake’s past, conversation and attempts to emotionally connect to belong first and foremost to _him_. To be the only victim of Blake’s very competent seduction.

Celebrations continued apace. Vila insisted his bawdy song about a couple who drank excessively, brawled and ended up in jail on Christmas day was ‘traditional’, and was vindicated by Orac after Avon had flatly refused to credit this. Avon snipped that it didn’t sound _anything_ like Blake’s historical efforts.

Blake had obviously been a popular secondary-school history instructor in another life. Right down to how all this festive cheer was a little lame. Terribly _sweet,_ but undeniably lame. Bless Blake: thrust into a life of illicit crime against the state, when some part of him desperately wanted a tweed jacket and a crackling fire in the hearth and possibly a cat. A dog. Both. If there were drunken carols going, Blake was there, holding his hot mulled soma better than any of them and singing better than any of them besides, cajoling the company off unenthused state anthems and over to something classic that seemed, at least on the surface, less political. They didn’t know this one? Not a problem. He had a pocket-projector, and Blake was somehow good at teaching and _very_ convincing.

And though the others conspired to ruin Blake’s plans with their decidedly mediocre vocal contributions (Avon wondered if Inga could provide Blake with adequate backup here, where he certainly could not— as his kin, she had presumably received whatever musical instruction Blake had), they seemed to have fun, for what that was worth. Avon thought the spiraling minor chords of Blake’s carols strangely appealing. He tried to catch the names of the best—O Come O Come Emmanuel, We Three Kings, O Little Town of Bethlehem, O Holy Night, God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen. The words were largely incomprehensible, but the legible bits were interesting.

Vila rigged up a sound system in the mess, and the tinny synth rendition of something that said the words ‘Last Christmas’ often enough that Avon thought this was probably the title reminded Avon that it had been a year to date, actually, since he’d shot Blake. Bloody brilliant. Avon took an especially large gulp of his hot soma. Which, unfortunately, burned his tongue. And there again, _fantastic_.

Blake came over to join him, and knowing it wasn’t what he wanted to do, Avon felt himself being especially cagey and condescending about Blake’s plans for the rest of this ill-begotten holiday. By the time he got onto “shouldn’t you be telling Traub about this, rather than me?”, pronounced in the key of ‘shouldn’t you be telling your ideas to someone who cares?’, he knew the only word for himself was ‘brat’. Not something more mature, not even something more vicious—he was acting like a child who Blake should in all conscience spank. And he couldn’t _stop_ himself from being a parody of himself.

“Oh look,” Blake said dryly, as something enthusing about a good king named Wenceslas began to play, “I think this is your song—”

And right on cue the recorded choir got to “brightly shone the moon that night, and the frost was cruel.”

Avon gave Blake his most glittering, insincere smile. “How nice of you to ask them to play it. And on our anniversary, as well.” It was at this point Avon realized he’d had rather a lot of hot soma, as the night wore on.

Blake frowned in confusion. Got it. His face tightened.

“If you’re determined to make a misery of yourself just because I’ve made a decision you disagree with—” Avon snorted. As though _that_ wasn’t a constant occurrence—but Blake continued, “then I don’t know why you’re still here. You might have bowed out hours ago.”

Because you’re here, Avon wasn’t quite drunk enough to say. Wither thou goest, he didn’t think he’d ever be drunk enough to add while still conscious enough to articulate words.

When Avon didn’t respond, Blake sighed. “ _Fine_ ,” he ground out. “Be contrary for the sake of it. I’m going to enjoy myself, at least. I thought you might want to try it—but never mind.Forget it. Merry bloody Christmas, Avon.”

Blake stalked off, leaving Avon bereft. At least the soma had stuck around. Raising his eyebrows at his more faithful friend, Avon took another drink. Why should he pretend to be jolly? This was a bad idea and Blake hated him and his life was a ruin and everything was frankly shit. Then, deciding this was undignified and maudlin and very _Vila_ , he made his way back to the kitchens, because Avon was naturally the sort of person who hung around in the kitchens of parties.

He slipped in unobtrusively through the side door, only to find a mix of Federation and rebel soldiers seated at the main table, parked strategically around the liquor supplies, talking about a subject of some interest to him—namely Blake. Due to the structure of the kitchens—this small chamber stood off to the side of the main room—he was currently concealed. He elected to hang back. Hear the vox populi, for once, rather than Vila’s particular idiosyncratic edition thereof.

“I mean, I get now why they tried to pin the child abuse charges on him,” one Federation soldier said to his companions—another soldier from his own battalion, and one of their own lot. That was interesting—apparently the extent to which citizens believed the accusations concocted against Blake was, at the least, inconsistent. Avon hadn’t known what opinion on that looked like, outside rebel circles.

“What do you mean?” the other trooper asked.

“Well it’s obvious he’s gay,” the first soldier pointed out with a snort. “So I guess they thought it’d stick. Still a lot of that prejudice knocking around—they must’ve thought he was easy pickings.” He sounded more than a little disillusioned, certainly aware that he didn’t work for angels who never would. As well he might be—homophobia had been, officially, culturally unacceptable in the Federation since these children’s grandparents’ time. They had every reason to feel self-satisfied, complacent outrage at evidence of it.

“Could be gay _and_ a pedo,” the other trooper pointed out fairly, and Avon could feel his face twisting into a vicious expression at the word. Short and casual and vile, almost _funny_. Nothing he ever wanted to touch Blake. Nothing he ever wanted Blake to hear. He never had, in Avon’s presence. Perhaps people found it difficult to look at that resolute face and speak an obvious lie.

Their rebel soldier, to her credit, snorted. “His husband would castrate him, even if there weren’t kiddies involved. Our Avon doesn’t fuck around—took the first _thirty_ Pylene bases inside _months_. Not that there’s any need. Watch Blake. He won’t even notice, because he’s always watching his worse half.”

“They married?” The first soldier asked.

The rebel girl shrugged. “Near as. Put it this way—no one’s getting in there. People’ve tried, with Blake at least—Avon’s a bit scary for it. Blake knocks them back like ninepins.”

“Where I come from,” the second Federation soldier said, “you shack up five years like that, you’re married. Happens automatically. Common law.”

“They were separated for two of them,” the rebel pointed out. “After they stopped the Andromedans.”

The second trooper looked a little uncomfortable. “You can’t believe those rumors about them being there at the invasion.”

The first trooper shrugged. “I had a cousin who survived that one, and he _swears_ the Liberator was there. People say Jenna Stannis herself called in the fleet. Humanity ‘uber alles’, as old Tauber would say. She’s one of the good ones, our Tauber. Can’t say the same for some of these nutjobs.”

“They say one of your lot let the Andromendans in,” the rebel pointed out. “A right psychopath.”

“He was a rogue,” the first solder said sharply. “That’s not on me or anyone. Crazy’s crazy.”

“All right,” the girl conceded, “but that’s pretty fucking crazy, and I’m not sure that kind of crazy just happens by accident. You kill a lot of people, maybe human life in general starts to look pretty cheap to you.”

“Pax,” said the second trooper. “Come on, it’s Christmas, and what does this do? So they get separated for two years. That’s a bit hard on a couple.”

“Didn’t peg you as a romantic,” the first soldier said.

“I’ve not seen my fiancé since I got drafted,” the second soldier said shortly, “so I don’t much like to talk about it.”

“I heard Avon shot him,” the first trooper said like it was some salacious bit of gossip. Unseen, Avon took a slow, considered drink. He knew people must speak about it. This didn’t come as a surprise.

“Yeah, but it wasn’t like that,” the rebel shook her head. “One of your lot infiltrated the base as a recruit, and caused this muck up where Avon thought Blake had betrayed himself—just shat his whole life away and turned informant. So he shot him because—you know, because proper Blake would rather _die_ , than be that person, than be alive because he turned his back on the lot of us and everything he believes in. That’s _hard_ , but it’s love, I think, to do that for someone. To value who they are and what they care about above even their life. And once Avon understood he’d been tricked, he just waited to die with him. And once Blake recovered he didn’t waste any time moving Avon into his room. So whatever happened, they understood each other and worked it out.”

She took a drink. Continued. “And I’m not joking about the way they watch each other. It’s like they’re the only people in the room. We all laugh about it. Not where Avon can hear, mind you.”

“Shout a lot, though,” the second soldier pointed out.

The first nodded. “Once we saw them rowing outside your command centre, through the long-range. From what we could tell it was about jackets and whether they needed them. Funniest thing. My parents are like that, though. Married thirty years. When my mam dies I swear da’ll go right after. Wouldn’t know what to do without her.”

“So he’s not a pedophile,” the second soldier granted. All shrugged and drank.

Avon debated what he was about to do (it was immature) (but what was maturity, after all), and then decided to hell with it.

“Excuse me,” he said glacially, striding purposefully into the room. He grabbed an unopened bottle off the table they were clustered around, then walked out the kitchen’s main door. From the corner of his eye he caught their terrified expressions, which made him suppress a grin. When the door swung closed behind him he heard the first soldier blurt out “ _shit_ I nearly _died_ ”, and heard the rebel girl lose herself to gales of laughter.

That was, Avon supposed, how biography and myth got spun out of the complicated play of events and perspective. Avon would have contested the rebel soldier’s account on almost every detail, but it hadn’t been incorrect in the sense that the wrong answer to a mathematical equation was. It was a prettier gloss on the situation, certainly. Neater. The reason he’d done it, collapsed into something decent and speakable. The aftermath, elided neatly with ‘and now Blake’s sleeping with him, so I guess it’s all right.’ Yes, he’d been that naïve too, once. Maybe, of the two of them, it was Blake who was constantly stripping away at _his_ naïveté.

He rejoined Blake, offering him the bottle. Thinking again about the cheap pleasures to be found in terrifying children.

“What are you smiling about?” Blake asked.

Avon shook his head. Blake glowered at not being told, but his expression softened slightly as he looked at Avon. Like it gave him some pleasure to see Avon happy.

Embarrassing, to watch Blake so obviously that everyone knew. But he didn’t think he could help it. If the girl was right, that was. He doubted that Blake watched him—he glanced sideways at the object of his thoughts and found Blake’s eyes quickly sliding away, leaving his scar sharply outlined in profile.

Ah, Avon thought with a quicker pulse. So Blake did watch him. He raked a possessive gaze over Blake, who was surveying the room now as though he’d always intended to look about him. Avon finished his drink, then took the bottle he’d given Blake, which Blake was drinking from, out of his hand—Blake still wasn’t looking at him—and took a long, slow sip, staring fixedly at Blake. He then tucked the bottle back into Blake’s grip.

“I think I’ll go to bed now,” he murmured.

Blake swallowed visibly. “I should stay and supervise.”

“Yes,” Avon drawled. “You should.”

He left, and whether Blake stayed, swayed by his sense of duty, or came to bed before time to be with him, in any sense, Avon felt rather like he’d won something. Blake got hard for him. He’d known that. But more than that, Blake watched him.

***

“Is this,” Avon asked on the second day of the armistice, “going to stretch until the day after Christmas?”

“Hm? Blake asked him, distracted by the soldiers’ efforts to build snowmen.

“The twenty-sixth,” Avon clarified. “Are we to resume hostilities on the twenty-sixth?”

Blake darted him an aghast look. “On _Boxing Day?_ ”

“What is boxing day.”

Blake sighed like he couldn’t deal with him right now. “Suffice it to say that Christmas was always a two-day rest period in the Federation for a reason.”

“The twenty-seventh, then?”

“Are you pushing me on this,” Blake asked, tapping his chin with his fingers, clearly not wanting to think about it, “because you want to know, because you want to know I’m working on it, or just to be provocative?”

“I am pushing you on it because you gave me the assignment to take this position and eliminate this plant, which has been defended by an opposition army for the past months,” Avon said sharply. “And because someone has to think about how we intend to do that, when the leaves and needles have fallen off the decorations, and someone’s had to clear up the mess, and we’ve taken down the paper chains to burn for fuel.” 

“Firstly, you’re a Scrooge. Secondly, I’ve just realized you’ll have no idea what that is. Thirdly, it’s _not_ as though we were making a lot of progress in that regard beforehand, is it Avon? Time for a different approach.”

Avon didn’t throw his datapad on the ground, stamp it to pieces and storm off screaming jibberish. But it was _very_ tempting.

That evening, he found Soolin leisurely carrying messages between Traub and Blake. They were in different rooms in the mess complex—both unobserved. Each had a chessboard out in front of them, which contained only their pieces.

“Kriegsspiel,” Blake explained, like that explained anything. “A variant of chess,” he elaborated. “They used to do this in Prussian military academies. It’s a war game. A training exercise. You know where your pieces are, but not your opponents’. You have to make inferences, based on your own losses, their possible moves, and what you know of them as players and people.” Soolin came in and took one of Blake’s pawns, observed his rapid response—it seemed he’d expected this—and strolled back to Traub.

“That sounds difficult,” Avon said. Like the sort of game you’d be difficult to beat at, he didn’t say.

He watched Blake play for a while. He supposed Blake was learning as much about Traub as a strategist as she was about him. Therefore this was not so much a risk as an exchange of materiel.

“Your glaring at me is putting me off,” Blake snapped.

Avon turned on his heel, only to run into Traub in the hall.

“You can tell him I forfeit,” she said ruefully. “I must go, I need some supper—thank him for the match for me, if you would? He has a knack for midgame tactics, I’ll give him that.”

He always did, Avon thought. A better idea occurred to him.

“Yes, you go along,” he said to Traub. “I’ll finish up here.”

He settled into Traub’s seat. When Soolin came back in she raised an eyebrow, but was otherwise impassive as he maneuvered Blake into checkmate with three moves. He didn’t think he could have managed it, ordinarily, but he had, after all, just seen Blake’s board (whereas Blake had only guesses as to his position, and everything Blake thought about his opponent’s tactics was now wrong). Then, via Soolin, Avon proposed a new game.

Avon hadn’t been sufficiently interested in chess to know older, disused variant-forms. He had, however, been a maths prodigy in a Federation magnet school, and thus had almost tripped and fallen into chess tournaments. He was willing to bet Blake’s knowledge of the rigid systems of memorized openings was rubbish.

He grinned when Soolin brought him one, two, three of Blake’s pawns. It _was_ rubbish. He tossed a captured white pawn in his hand extravagantly.

The game shifted radically, however, when Blake somehow used the opening in his own defenses, provided by the loss of his pawns, to push out his heavy artillery, force it past Avon’s lines (which involved making two sacrifices Avon wouldn’t have made, personally), and go on a bloody rampage in Avon’s back ranks, forcing him to respond defensively. Well two could play at that—Blake wasn’t going to be thinking about assassination, about the conditions for forcing a win rather than playing out the game. If Avon could just slip the knife into his king—had Blake castled? Was Blake, ultimately, the sort of person who castled? And if so—left or right? His left, Avon decided suddenly. More expansive, more daring, more exposed, less _expected_. Blake would castle, and he’d castle to the left. His king was on C1. If Avon sacrificed a knight (he _hated_ doing it, but desperate times) and brought his own Queen out, then--

“I thought something was amiss when ‘Traub’ played through what was probably more practically a forfeit, for _her_ ,” Blake said from the door. Avon’s hand stilled on his knight. “She’s good, but not that good. I knew it was _you_ when you lashed out because I took your rook off you. I’m tired, Avon, and I don’t particularly feel like playing games with you right now—I think I’ll get an early night.”

Blake left. Angry, Avon shoved himself up from the table (making the pieces shake, and some topple) and stalked over to the room Blake had been sitting in. Only to find that Blake had set all the pieces back in their starting positions before coming, so Avon had no idea what Blake’s actual arrangements had been. All but his white king, which was neatly laid on its side, in the position of formal resignation, in the middle of the board. Reminding Avon suddenly of Blake himself.

Avon slammed the flat of his palm into Blake’s ranks and sent the pieces tumbling. Some fell to the floor, bouncing and rolling.

He supposed he wouldn’t ever know if he’d been right about Blake’s castling. Maybe he hadn’t. Castling was about caution and self-protection, and Blake was as rubbish at that as he was at memorized openings. Unless, Avon thought with a sad twist of his mouth, he’d gotten better at it. What else was all of this?

***

“New Years,” Blake said. “I’ve just come from Traub.”

“What?” Avon said.

“New Years,” Blake repeated. “The troops are willing. Possibly Epiphany.”

“Blake,” Avon said, “what are we doing squatting here if not fighting for some material advantage? It’s hardly a holiday camp. Eventually the euphoria will fade and someone will remember their cousin was on Saurian Major when we blew it, or what the Federation did to Auron. You can’t have this forever.” What Blake wanted wasn’t just the truce, it was the potential the truce represented. The idea that because a truce was _like_ peace, it might become it. He’d slice himself open, wanting things like that. He was a _fool_.

“Maybe I can,” Blake said, the shape of a plan behind his words.

“ _Well?_ ” Avon snapped.

“It’s difficult to explain,” Blake said, giving Avon a quick, sullen look, “and I don’t think you’ll be particularly sympathetic.”

Avon blinked at him. “Are you seriously not going to tell me your plan? Because you don’t imagine I will be _sympathetic?_ Despite how vital it is that _I_ know it?” In part he couldn’t quite believe it, and in part he was furious. He laughed nastily. “It’s like a trauma-flashback to the good old days.”

Blake looked up at him properly, and Avon could tell that remark had been a red flag to a bull—that Blake had set his head down to be properly angry with him now, where before he’d only hesitated to spill out the shape of the nascent thing he was working on. For fear Avon would respond—well, like he’d responded.

“You accused me of that constantly,” Blake said with slow decision, “and I can think of only a handful of times it was actually true.”

“A rather ample handful. And they were fairly memorable times,” Avon rejoined.

“Whereas from what I’ve heard, your leadership in my absence was a model of full disclosure and democratic decision making,” Blake countered.

Avon stiffened.

“Oh,” Blake said mildly, with a raised eyebrow, “so _you_ can criticize me endlessly, but when _I_ even imply the reverse, you’re defensive and hurt.”

“Unlike you, I didn’t pretend I had particularly democratic inclinations.”

“That is the worst excuse I’ve ever heard,” Blake shouted at Avon, throwing his datapad down on their bed. “What, because I tried to be decent, it’s my fault if I _ever_ failed to live up to that standard? But because you loudly said you didn’t care and no one should hold you responsible for anything, even _after_ you took active responsibility for people and the Liberator, your slightest moral action ought to earn you a gold star, while your worst mistakes should be glossed over? You don’t get to opt out like that. You don’t get to have a double standard, especially one that relies on my being infallible, which I _never_ claimed to be. That’s blinkered hypocritical _shit_ , Avon, and I expect better of you.”

Blake stormed off, and Avon regarded the datapad fixedly. So. Blake had come to discuss this with him, and he’d annoyed Blake sufficiently that now he didn’t know the plan, couldn’t weigh in on it and either improve or counter it, and Blake was taking his confidences elsewhere. As he himself had essentially suggested Blake should the previous evening, with his 'shouldn’t you be telling Traub about this, rather than me'. Which was, of course, nothing _like_ what he wanted to happen. Lovely.

He sat down on the pad and picked up Blake’s datapad. Snapped the encryption with a second’s work. Blake expected him to really, at this point. It was like leaving Vila in a room with a locked box. No clues to the plan Blake was working on here.

Listless, Avon paged through Blake’s open documents. A book file—Avon stuck a bookmark on Blake’s page and flipped back to the beginning.

He felt as though he was still hunting Blake, in some ways. Chasing him around through the detritus of their combined life. Searching for him in his sentences. Putting away Blake’s jackets, taking them up from where he’d thrown them across chairs, with a quick caress. Sharing his soma bottle instead of tasking the spice and heat from the mulled liquor on Blake’s mouth. Fucking instead of kissing. Reading his books instead of him.

Avon liked the first sentence—Marley was dead, to begin with. Where did one go from there?

Blake came back hours later, and stilled in the doorway.

Avon glanced up at him, and saw for a moment in Blake’s expression something like wild, potent fondness, before Blake schooled his face to neutrality. More proof he was watched. Loved, in some measure.

Blake coughed. “What have you been getting up to?” He asked.

“Not work,” Avon admitted. “I’m through _Christmas Carol_ , and into _The Haunted Man_.” Another good first line that had pulled him down into reading more. ‘Everybody said so’, standing as its own crisp paragraph. They were only novellas. He’d always read quickly.

“Not as good,” Blake said ruefully.

“I had noticed,” Avon smiled at him. “Interesting, nonetheless.”

“ _You_ think it’s interesting?” Blake asked with a raised eyebrow.

Avon raised his own. “ _I_ think it’s interesting,” he teased. “As I said.” Now he knew what a Scrooge was, at least.

“Why?” Blake asked.

Avon found he would rather not say to Blake that there was something appallingly entrancing in the idea of a lonely, brilliant scientist (‘Everybody said he looked like a haunted man. The extent of my present claim for everybody is, that they were so far right. He did.’) living alone but for a few servants in a crumbling manor. ‘Haunted by an awful likeness of himself’, ‘with his features, and his bright eyes, and his grizzled hair, and dressed in the gloomy shadow of his dress’. The apparition seduced the scientist, who had been thwarted in love long ago and had lost people important to him, by promising that he could make him ‘forget the sorrow, wrong, and trouble’ he had known, could ‘cancel their remembrance’.

The gift was, naturally, poisoned: the scientist found not only that he was a listless, unfeeling, aggressive hulk without his memories of pain to temper him, but that, void of remembrance, he also sucked memory and meaning out of everyone he met. That he could hardly walk the streets for fear of hurting passers by. That everyone he touched was ruined, simply by having known him.

Avon had been smiling, a little, because the end, which he was almost through, was saccharine. But it was clear he was in the hands of a brutal master: the sort of writer who’d beat the tears out of you, if you had any to give him. There was something attractive in the ending’s defiant refusal of bitterness, in its refusal to relinquish pain. Its insistence that pain was something you decided what to do with: it didn’t ruin you, you built on it. In the ecstatic acceptance of and gratitude for ambivalent lives. He could see why Blake liked Dickens. He could see that this was Blake’s core idea of Christmas: boughs and food and color and unseemly, rambunctious joy against long winter. Plenty, for everyone. Dignity born out of brash, coarse, unruly love.

“They’re rather insistent,” Avon said. “A touch polemical at times. I can see why you like them.” But he kept his voice gentle.

“Why do _you?_ ” Blake asked in an equally gentle tone, guessing, correctly, that Avon did.

“Well, for a start I find them somewhat challenging,” Avon admitted. The least of his reasons, and thus the easiest to say. “I don’t know the period.”

“Maybe I can help?” Blake asked, voice making the offer not pedantic, but cautious.

“What’s this place Redlaw lives in?” Avon asked automatically, curious about how property worked in this world—how poor were these Terrerbys, if they had a room to let? He’d never known a Delta to own the place they lived. And he was hungry for Blake to talk to him, like they had talked when they’d only just become friends.

Blake sat on the bed with him and tried to explain, Avon asking follow-up questions. “And what’s holly? Is there a special significance—”

Blake nodded, and it felt like planning a raid together, but with less threat to wind their voices to a pitch of impersonal acrimony. With more space for sweetness between them.  

“Still annoyed with me?” Avon asked when he couldn’t think of anything else he wanted to know, just now.

“Not as present, no,” Blake said with a lilt of humor in his voice, regarding him warmly.

Perhaps, Avon thought, personal grudges between them might operate like longstanding feuds between nations. Teal and Vandor disliked one another at an institutional level and fought by force of habit, the real and continuing motive for their disagreement having become muddled and faded, even as the sentiment it had generated lingered.

Perhaps forgiveness looked like this. Incremental. Winding closer and closer, as the underlying problem eroded and Blake realized he wasn’t really angry any more. Perhaps this was how people moved beyond things, moved on—slow steps, the crawl of spectators past an accident or a disturbance. No grand gestures, no running, just on and on and love after love until you pressed through the narrow passage and came out on the other side. And you could look back, then—wasn’t that a hard time for us? But in the present it would feel closed, you would only think of it at your own discretion. It wouldn’t intrude constantly. A thing finished. Solid enough to build on.

Perhaps in another year, at this point in a conversation much like this one, Blake would take Avon’s chin in his hand and tilt his head up and kiss him. Avon would wait anyway, wait for Blake forever. But he’d do it with a lighter heart, as steadfast as someone doing penance in a fairy tale, if he could think, in a year he’ll remember this part of how to love me. In another, this.

Avon directed the conversation back to the books, and casually, faux-absently touched the back of Blake’s hand as he did so. Blake didn’t shrink away. Avon didn’t press it too much. Stopped, after a moment. Not too much and not too fast. Felt the touch of Blake’s hand under his fingertips for the rest of the day. Blake didn’t have a monopoly on hard-won hope.

***

Avon whirled when he felt the cold thwack on the back of his neck as he walked to the command bunker.

“That might have been a missile,” he hissed at Soolin. Was she even paying attention?

She shrugged, smirking. “It wasn’t. And I was fairly sure you didn’t want me to take out your assailant.”

Avon glared at across the field, where Blake was involved in a pitched snowball battle, pretending not to have taken the time to land one on him, but clearly far too amused and pleased with himself to have done it on accident.

“No,” he said, his eyes narrowing. “Blake will pay for this. I’ll see to that myself.”

And so it was that Avon ended up twenty feet behind Blake’s position (waist-high snow-barricades Blake’s side were taking cover behind), with a wall for cover and a pile of thirty neatly packed snowballs beside him.

“Oh Blake,” he said in a sing-song voice, and Blake turned automatically at the sound of his voice to catch a powdery, softly packed ball full in the face. It shattered beautifully, leaving Blake covered, the snow no doubt finding its way down his shirt, where it would inevitably make itself known in a variety of incredibly irritating ways. At Blake’s expression of wounded, immense dignity, Avon started to laugh so hard he nearly dropped his next missile. But no, that wouldn’t do.

Blake caught sight of Avon’s stockpile, and his eyes widened with comic dismay. Avon fired off several more in a row as Blake stooped to gather snow to retort. But, admitting it was useless, Blake appeared to get another idea. He simply charged Avon, head down.

“Not fair, not _fair_ —” Avon had time to get out, trying to run backwards while still throwing the armful of missiles he’d scooped up when he’d cottoned on to Blake’s plan to ram him. When Blake tackled him, he smooshed a ball right against Blake’s determined face. Undaunted, Blake scooped up a handful of snow and shoved it against the back of Avon’s neck, trying to get it down his shirt—Avon’s jacket mercifully offering him _some_ protection. Avon yelped and twisted, trying to get it out, but unfortunately this left his front vulnerable—and Blake had another handful of snow, and his weight to pin Avon with. Avon made a sound like a cat that had been stepped on as Blake methodically rubbed snow down his shirtfront.

“Do you yield?” Blake asked sweetly.

“You utter bastard,” Avon swore, wriggling out of his grasp and attempting to shake the snow out. He gave Blake a look that he was a little afraid must have been something like a wounded pout, because of how Blake’s face softened.

“Let’s get you inside, before you get frostbite.”

Avon frowned at both the unnecessary coddling and the inaccuracy. “I’m in no danger whatsoever of—”

Blake rolled his eyes. “Let’s get you inside and out of those _wet clothes_ before you _get frostbite_ , Avon,” he said meaningfully. “And before anyone notices I have the beginnings of an erection despite the temperature,” he said sotto voice, stepping closer to dust some snow off Avon’s shoulder.

“Frostbite is a very serious risk,” Avon agreed with a smirk, heading towards their bunker.

“Given that I won—” Blake began when the door was shut behind them, teasingly angling to top.

“Won?” Avon asked politely.

“You yielded!” Blake insisted indignantly.

Avon shook his head slowly. “Did I say that, Blake? You really must learn to be less precipitous.” Avon flipped open his lined satchel, revealing that he’d taken out the papers and stocked up on ammunition. Avon casually palmed a snowball in his gloved hand, tossing it up and down. A light dusting of snow fell off the ball as it landed in his hand.

“Are you threatening me, Avon?” Blake said, voice even.

“You started it,” Avon said primly, looking from the ball to Blake as though he might throw it.

Blake swallowed visibly.

Avon grinned sharply, putting the ball down. “My turn, I think.” He ran the cold, wet fingertip of his synthleather glove down the neck of Blake’s slightly open shirt. “Strip, Blake.”

He didn’t mind Blake topping. In an absolute sense, he even preferred it. But winning Blake’s submission was certainly not uninteresting.

Avon watched the process, arms crossed and eyes dark. When Blake had managed it, he pushed him to the bed, straddled him and ripped off his own right glove with his teeth.

“Not going to get out of those wet clothes after all?” Blake asked.

“No,” Avon said without elaborating, pulling his cock out of his trousers with his still-gloved left hand, pumping out a dollop of lubricant from the bottle onto his right with a practiced motion, and slicking wet fingers around and into Blake.

Blake gasped. “Your hand is _freezing_.”

Avon made an exaggerated moue of sympathy. “And here I thought I was fucking a big, tough rebel. You’ve endured torture—you can take—”

“You?” Blake asked.

Avon smiled, shoving himself into Blake. “Mm. Evidently.”

“In a real fight,” Blake said languidly as Avon fucked him, rubbing Avon's back with his hand in descending circles, easing Avon's trousers further down, “you wouldn’t stand a chance.”

Avon laughed, surprised and delighted that Blake was still with him, rather than trying to shut himself away. “Is that so?”

“It is.” Blake said with lazy confidence. “I have strength on you. Size.”

Avon palmed Blake’s somewhat more generously proportioned cock. “Yes, I’ve noticed. Yet here you are,” he crowed. “Because _I_ use my advantages. I have cunning on you, Blake. Cunning and _ruthlessne_ —fuck!”

While Avon had been distracted by contemplation of his own Machiavellian virtues, Blake had, unnoticed, lubricated his own large hand and slid it around so that he could nudge Avon’s trousers down around his thighs and push two thick fingers into Avon.

“What was that, Avon?”

“Shut up,” Avon panted.

“You were telling me about your incredible ruthlessness,” Blake purred. “Go on, I was interested.”

“Shut _up,_ ” Avon repeated, pushing himself down on Blake’s fingers helplessly, stroking Blake’s cock harder. Blake _would_ come first, he could still win this.

Blake mock-pouted. “But it was terribly sexy, Avon.”

Avon felt his face do something humiliating—and the noise he made was a little—well.

Blake couldn’t have missed that if he’d tried. “Liked that, I see. Vanity, Avon?”

“Not exactly,” Avon said through his teeth. He pulled out several stops, gripping Blake hard and stroking him fast. Trying to force the orgasm out of him, or at _least_ stop Blake talking. Because he liked Blake talking. Much too much.

“But it’s true,” Blake said, the increasing raggedness of his voice only abetting his purpose. “ _God_ you’re sexy, Avon. I’ve always thought so. But I didn’t know how _particularly_ handsome you’d look fucking me stupid.” Avon breathed harder as Blake fingered him, keeping up the same slow, deliberate rhythm, even as Avon lost control of his own pace and started stroking Blake erratically and frantically, jerking his hips.

“Gorgeous,” Blake gasped, “you’re _so_ gorgeous, I can’t believe I get to do _this_ to _you_ —” ‘this’ consisting of shoving two additional fingers into Avon, and with four of Blake’s big, warm fingers in him Avon couldn’t thrust, couldn’t _think_ , felt his mouth pop open, wanted to _scream_ , “I can’t believe you’re—” Blake bit his lip so as not to say ‘mine’, but Avon _felt_ it, and came on a surge of desperate elation, falling over Blake. Blake finished himself off by thrusting into Avon’s still tight-clenched hand, against his stomach, making a mess of Avon’s shirt. _God_ Avon couldn’t have cared less. He slid out and off of Blake with an inelegant flop to Blake’s side.

“Snow doesn’t keep,” Blake pointed out. “Your bag’s going to be full of ice water.”

Avon snorted. “I should pour it out on you.”

“For using your own tactics against you?”

Avon sketched a lazy hand in the air. “You might consider it a rejoinder in that vein.”

“I _might_ , but I think I’d _probably_ consider it rude,” Blake said.

Avon laughed. “You’ve such a great respect for etiquette.”

“Very true,” Blake said with solemnity.

Called me his, Avon thought with smug pleasure.  Or very nearly. It was simply factually true, but it felt wonderful. Blake had never talked to him in bed like that before. Had never seemed so comfortable. Avon stripped, making a face at his soiled shirt, and they dozed, and the tail end of Christmas Eve slipped past, into what was technically the day itself.

Then suddenly Blake was shaking him awake. “What’s that?” Blake was asking sharply, his voice still rough with sleep. “Av’n, do you hear that?”

Avon raised his head, trying to concentrate, chasing sleep from his mind—this was very probably important. “Ships,” he said, alarm piercing through him. “Atmosphere burn, that’s _ships_.”

“Yes I _thought_ so but how _many?_ ” Blake growled. “Theirs or ours?”

“I don’t know,” Avon said, tossing Blake his trousers from where they’d landed, on his side of the bed. Of course he didn’t—and of course Blake was just thinking aloud, not asking properly. He found his own trousers and Blake’s cleaner shirt and put them on—Blake was closer to the box containing their clothing, and understood what Avon was doing and why, and that it was on him have to fetch himself a new shirt, having spoilt Avon’s.

“Blake!” Tarrant called from outside, sounding animated, “Avon, come and see this—”

“But does he sound _good_ excited or _bad_ excited?” Blake murmured to himself. Avon couldn’t tell either.

They charged outside the bunker and looked up at the sky, Avon automatically noting the color of the force shield in the sky—a firm and strong opalescence. The people manning the defenses despite the truce had obeyed his emergency instructions perfectly.

And then he noted the ships themselves. Their boxy, modified, non-standard forms, which benefitted from no streamlined Federation design. Just now he found their ugliness about most beautiful thing he’d ever seen. He recognized one of the crafts quite easily.

“Ours,” Avon said with a grin he thought would crack his face. “That is Jenna, home from the wars. Earlier than we projected, and with no word of massive losses to herald her or evidence of a massive fleet tailing her. Reinforcements, it seems. Look—three ships.”

Blake started laughing, and Tarrant beamed like the young man he still was.

Blake strode off towards the command center without a backward glance; Avon didn’t mind. He and Tarrant followed.

In a full baritone, Blake sang to himself as he walked. “I saw three ships come sailing in, on Christmas day in the morning—”

The camp was in some confusion. The Federation troops who’d been trapped under the Rebel shields when they went up looked decidedly nervous.

Blake took Tarrant by the shoulder. “Spread the word that our guests are still our guests. No one’s to be harmed in any way—remember, some of our people are over there, for a start. Run and get me Deva, and have him signal Traub.”

“Right.” Tarrant jogged off.

In the command bunker, with the door shut, before anyone else arrived, Blake paced frantically.

“What do you want to do with it?” Avon asked, jerking his head at the advantage outside.

Blake shook his head. “I don’t want to attack.”

“Not while under truce?”

Blake shook his head again. “That, and I want to use the advantage to force a peace—Avon I _think_ we _might_ be able do this without firing a shot.”

“That sounds decidedly risky,” Avon said, wary.

Blake was rubbing his chin with his hand, and glanced over at Avon. “Oh it’s flat-out insane, I know—but come with me on this—”

Avon rolled his eyes. “Don’t I always?”

Blake stopped pacing abruptly. Looked at him. “Ultimately you do,” he agreed, his voice quiet and intense.

“Kicking and screaming,” Avon said, not wanting to over-sell the thing.

“Sometimes I need a kicking,” Blake admitted. “And I like your screaming. Yes, Avon. You always come with me.”

A pause stretched between them.

“Anywhere,” Avon found himself saying. Simply that.

“Across the universe,” Blake agreed. “I have the proof.”

Avon shrugged. “Either with you or in search of you, it seems.”

“Yes, that’s right. You looked for me,” Blake said. It should have been a reminder, but it was as though it had only become true for Blake in this moment. As though he were discovering it. As though he’d just realized he’d overlooked the phrase that changed the whole meaning of a passage.

“You waited for me,” Avon offered in return. He didn’t know what that had meant—Blake had never elaborated. He couldn’t picture Blake in a series of compounds like foxholes, always half-listening for the sound of his ship. Always half believing, however bad it got, that Avon was coming for him. Was simply taking a while finding him. He wondered if it might, after everything, be the counterpoint to his own longing.

Blake lifted his hand. Avon didn’t know what he would have done, but Deva rushed in at that moment.

“Traub on the line,” he said briskly, handing the long-distance electrofuller to Blake. “You can canoodle later.”

“I have never ‘canoodled’ in my life,” Avon said with a sniff, taking the finicky electrofuller _off_ Blake, who would only be ages getting it to tune.

***

Traub and Blake talked for hours. Avon gave them space, and felt no irrational jealousy. Blake saw him. Blake acknowledged him. Blake claimed him. And no one had ever yet been able to get around Blake’s set will, to get between him and something he wanted. If Blake had chosen him, Avon knew he need fear no one in the universe.

When Blake embraced Traub, who looked strong but shaken, and very alone, before she addressed her troops, Avon felt only a kind of kinship with her. And a kind of pride in Blake, who loved his victories but wasn’t cruel in them.

Traub explained to everyone present that the truce she and Blake had agreed to would be upheld. That, acknowledging the rebels’ superior numbers and firepower, they were also going to negotiate a surrender. She knew she was not authorized to do this. She knew she had been instructed to fight down to the last man. But she could not—no, she would not do that, for Pylene. It was not, as only a few of them still believed, life-saving medical technology they had to protect at all costs. It was a chemical she had never believed in the use of, and she could no longer condone its use with her service, even in defense of the integrity of the Federation. Because—

She took a ragged breath, glanced at Blake, and back at her papers. Continued. Because she no longer believed that the integrity of the Federation was vital for the security and cultural preservation of humanity. Her parents had been officers. Her grandmother had been a Commander, and Traub had worked hard to attain that rank, had been proud of it, and had tried to execute it with honor. But the service, that had only grudgingly let in and elevated a colonial such as herself, was no longer even the ambivalent force for good it had once been. She could no longer pretend she was serving her grandmother’s army—the fleet of Samor, the army of the Founders. The line had become a warped, broken thing, and she now believed that honor in its service was dishonor to the principles she’d chosen to live by.

She was tired of excusing atrocities, some of which had been perpetrated by her comrades and peers. She was tired of service with crimmos denied the therapeutic treatments they needed, treatments which were available, because their berserker madness was an amusement to the state—they were not even effective soldiers. She was tired of working with mutoids. She was tired of poor management, of arbitrary punishments. Tired of shooting conscripts who deserted or mutinied, tired of leading hapless _farmers_ and colonials like herself, not soldiers, to their deaths, and for such causes as this. Tired of fear and tired of hunger.

Provision would be made for her soldiers, after the truce, which was to end after New Years’ Day. They had until then to make their decisions. Her troops were not to be prisoners of war. They could wait here after the rebels had destroyed their target, and be retrieved by Federation troops carriers. These carriers’ officers honestly might or might not hold the soldiers to blame for Truab’s decision. She couldn’t say. The soldiers could also be repatriated to their home planets by the rebels, if they chose. Or—and this was her choice—they could join with the rebel forces. This would involve a vetting process.

But Traub thought well of the rebels’ chances. She had trained in military history, and thought she could see a tide turning. The future would look back on this not as a criminal uprising, but as a liberation. And she would feel, as a solider and person, more comfortable under Blake’s command than under anyone she could name on her own side, at present. She was sorry if any of her people felt she had failed them, but she had weighed the options, and thought this the only means of holding herself accountable both for their lives, and to her own conscience.

Reactions were mixed. There were some tears, at the surrender—impossible to say by observation whether they were relieved or bitter. Perhaps the people crying them didn’t know. A few voiced outright anger—the act of fighting had made them patriots, or they had volunteered and felt committed to their sentiments due to having suffered for them. Some already planning to go home. Some looking lost, not knowing what to make of an _end_ to the fighting. Some determined in Traub’s defense—she’d done right by them. And some of these determined, by extension, on following where she led.

Mixed groups of trusted Rebel and Federation troops (those particularly conscientious and loyal to Traub—veterans of several campaigns with her, most of whom she thought would very probably come over with her) patrolled both camps that night. But the riots Traub and Avon had both suggested as a possibility did not occur. Christmas was quiet, as if it were holy again.

Back in the Command Center, Traub’s top officers, the woman herself, Blake, Avon and a few of their people sat in quiet. (Jenna, who they’d spoken to, maintained orbit.) Traub drank, slowly and methodically.

“And if there is a murder?” she asked no one in particular. “Suppose one of mine kills one of yours, or vice-versa. How are we to preserve this peace, should such a thing occur?”

Blake considered it.

“Hostages,” he said at last. “I’ll announce that if any of yours are found dead, and we can prove that one of ours was responsible, I’ll offer my own life in recompense.”

Traub nodded immediately. “I shall do the same—”

“What?” Avon snarled, loud in the quiet of the room. Several people turned to look at him.

Blake glared at him, taken aback at being publicly contradicted and undermined. “If necessary.”

“Absolutely unacceptable.” Avon said, standing up. “You are prepared to balance your own life and the overall fate of this entire enterprise against _what_ , Blake, the loyalty and good temper of _each and every one_ of your soldiers in this stressful situation?”

Blake stood up too. “I am prepared to do whatever it takes to prevent the loss of thousands of lives, and if I _were_ to die—”

Avon didn’t want to hear the end of that sentence. “Choose a different hostage, if you insist on this idiotic plan. This is not open for debate. I am certainly less universally beloved, but I am also less necessary.”

“ _You’re_ volunteering? Are you out of your mind?” Blake shouted.

“Gentlemen,” Traub said, sounding somewhat awkward.

“Excuse us,” Blake and Avon said in unison, marching off by unspoken consensus to the small commander’s office, which the room led onto and which they both used. Blake slammed the door behind him.

“And here I thought you wanted to be free of me,” Blake said mockingly.

Avon only just stopped himself from punching him.

“Throw that in my face _one more time_ ,” Avon said, turning to look at the wall rather than at Blake and crossing his arms over his chest.

“Can you see another solution, or are you just shooting down my idea? If I died there are several people who could take on my responsibilities, you first among them,” Blake said.

“If you died,” Avon said, whirling back to face Blake, “I would be a breath behind. I would do it to _spite you_.”

“That’s ridiculous,” Blake said, paling. “If I die—Avon you’ve _got_ to carry on. This rebellion needs you—win the day and you can be a free man again, as rich and safe as you ever wanted. What if I asked you to see this through?”

“For you?” Avon mocked. “Oh well then I suppose I’d bloody _do it_ , Blake. I would force myself to, right after I took a rather excessive revenge on whoever was responsible. You wouldn’t approve of that part.” Avon smiled horribly. “Do you like the idea of it, Blake? I would crawl across the Earth to plant the standard soaked with your blood, when all I would want to do was to be in the ground. _Rich and safe?_ ” He laughed, and it crackled with madness, and for once he didn’t _care_.

“You _could_ ask me to ‘see this through’, after you got yourself killed for nothing, but I don’t think you’d _dare_.” The awful smile slipped off Avon’s mouth. “Because you know better than that, whatever you’re allowing yourself to believe about me these days. Make no mistake, this would be the cruelest thing you have ever asked of anyone. So perhaps you should think about _exactly_ what you would be requesting.”

Blake stared at him, eyes huge in his face. Avon felt his chest heaving.

“You love me,” Blake said slowly, with awe.

Avon exploded in rage. “I have been _trying_ to tell you that _for the past_ —”

Blake seized Avon, his whole upper body. He pulled Avon to him in a messy embrace, kissing him desperately, as though he could only breathe air from Avon’s lungs, would suffocate without it. Again and again, his grip firm and feverish and shaking, his fingers twisted in Avon’s jacket. Avon felt his knees go weak under the onslaught. Blake’s mouth on his, his desperate, fervent, sweet mouth—it shorted out his mind.

“I’d live on if you died,” Blake panted between kisses, “but I wouldn’t want to, Avon, I wouldn’t _want_ to, I can’t _stand_ the idea of you being held hostage to this, of you dying—”

“Nor can I,” Avon snarled, pulling Blake back to him.

“Don’t leave me,” Blake insisted. “No, you _said_ you wouldn’t, you’ll never—”

“That’s right,” Avon said, kissing him again. “And you, you _promise_ me you’ll keep yourself safe, you _must_ —”

“I’ll try,” Blake said.

Avon nodded desperately. “That is what I want. All I can promise, all I can ask.”

“We’ll think of something else,” Blake agreed. “I’ll tell Traub we need to find another way.”

Avon nodded again. “No,” he changed his mind, “wait a moment.” He kissed Blake for several more minutes, trading light brushes of their lips for Blake shoving himself into his mouth. Moaning lightly into it, which made Blake grip his shoulders harder and do it again and again. Returning him equally desperate invasions. Bending Blake back against their desk, slipping from his mouth at last, sucking his neck hard just to kiss everything he could.

“Now?” Blake suggested after, breathing hard and touching Avon’s forehead with his own.

Avon gave a single, sharp jerk of his head.

Blake brushed his nose against Avon’s in a light kunik. Oh, Avon thought, that is _grotesquely_ sweet. He had better do that again.

“My partner,” Blake said very professionally to Traub when they reentered the main room, “suggests we consider alternative arrangements, given my strategic value as a figurehead.”

“Yes,” Traub said dryly, “that seems a very practical objection, and I am sure it was among those voiced. Your neck is bruising, incidentally. And your sound-proofing could be better, given that that is your command office. Mind you, we could not make out words. More a general impression of shouting. And then of not shouting.”

Blake pretended that hadn’t been said. He glanced at the wall-chronometer. “Shall we discuss the question tomorrow?”

“At your earliest convenience,” Traub said. “Meanwhile, I shall attempt to find another solution. Merry Christmas, gentlemen.”

“And to all a good night,” Avon said, making his way towards the door, intent on their bunker.

“God bless us, every one,” Vila said from the table, into his mug. Blake and Avon gave him identical quizzical expressions.

“What?” Vila asked, affronted. “I can read classic literature!”

Blake and Avon both gave him their individual ‘oh really, Vila?’ looks. Vila couldn’t withstand the combined assault.

“I saw a puppet version,” Vila admitted.

That made sense. Avon left with no further comment, trailing a Blake who, over his shoulder, threatened to lend a whining, reluctant Vila his copy.

***

Blake, even when deeply depressed, had been no broken wreck of himself. Blake didn’t break easily: Avon and the best professional interrogators and everyone who’d worked with him in hellish, stressful situations knew that. He might get knocked down, but he got back up. Chuck Blake into prison and he arranged a better ration-distribution system, probably right before leading a prison-break. He almost couldn’t help it: it was just an expression of the core of him.

But Avon had managed, without ever wanting to, to set Blake back worse than anything else Avon had ever seen. Blake had kept functioning, but like a boat trailing an anchor across the floor of the ocean behind it, pressing on against the drag. Avon had a feeling that nothing he’d tried—time and gestures and incremental movement and, finally, brutal and eviscerating honesty, had been _wrong_ , precisely. But now the moment had come—they’d arrived at it, stumbled upon it, or earned it. And everything they’d done had made it possible, and everything would be brought to bear.

Blake sat down on the bed, and Avon sat beside him, watching him almost warily. A foot away, to give him space. A silence fell between them.

“Blake,” he breathed, asking him to start, and Blake took in a deep breath himself.

“I tried so hard not to be angry with you,” Blake said, as if the words hurt. As though they were heavy stones, sewn into his stomach. Like they’d been put there when the surgeons had closed up his wounds. There was a fairy tale like that. Avon couldn’t remember it, bar this image, though Blake very likely could.

“I couldn’t stop it,” Blake said hollowly. “I thought it was stupid, unfair even, and what was it helping? But I couldn’t _stop_ myself.”

“I know precisely what you mean,” Avon said. “At times I mean to be uncivil, and at times I don’t regret having been. But there are occasions where I feel—hardly able to stop. Though it doesn’t forward my purpose in the slightest.”

Blake nodded. “I wanted to forgive you. I wanted so much not to be angry with you anymore. And I didn’t, I _couldn’t_. It hurt so much, just looking at you _hurt_ , because I love you _so_ much.”

Avon reached a hand over and rested it on Blake’s leg, and Blake took it in his own. Avon had never thought he’d comprise one half of the sort of couple that held hands, but the gesture was beginning to feel natural between them.

“I thought,” Blake continued, “that you knew me perfectly, I thought you were the one person in the world who wouldn’t ever let me down. Before we were parted on the Liberator, the way you looked at me there at the end—I _knew_ you cared, whatever you said. Somehow, I imagined that when I saw you again, everything would be all right. I almost thought the war would end, right then. I had insane expectations, because I loved you that much. I _still_ have insane expectations of you, because I _still_ love you that much.”

“I knew I ‘cared’, as you put it, for almost the whole latter half of that last year on the Liberator,” Avon said. “Though it had, of course, been going on—longer. I was a coward. I’m sorry.”

Blake shook his head automatically. “You aren’t a coward.”

“I _was,_ ” Avon insisted, “in this.”

“Whereas I was a fool. I _raced_ after that traitor, Arlen, to recruit her, because the psych profile they’d mocked up on her was the spitting image of yours. They knew how to bait their trap. Looking back, she even had your haircut.” Blake laughed mirthlessly. “How stupid could I be, how _easy_ did I make it for them?”

Avon hadn’t known that. He didn’t like being used like that, against Blake, but he found he couldn’t resent being Blake’s weakness. It was another way in which they were each other’s.

“I ran to Terminal and lost the Liberator for the sound of your voice,” Avon reminded him, clarifying what Blake had only known in broad, unemotive terms before. He didn’t mention Cally—couldn’t bring himself to. “I couldn’t tell you now what your simulacrum promised me. I doubt I could have told you on the day I received the message. I had all the safety a ship like that could offer me, and all the wealth of the treasure room. There was no reward you could have offered to tempt me but yourself. Perhaps I’m less able to receive criticism because I lack your protection against it: I know that I have been the greater fool.”

He moved to kiss Blake, but Blake held back. Hurt, Avon looked at him. “And every time you kissed me,” Blake said, “to apologize, or for the form of the thing, or as a favor, to try and give me what I wanted—it _hurt_.”

Avon looked at him bewildered, then laughed. “Oh Blake, that was—only partly for you, I’m afraid.”

Blake gave him a mulish look. “Come off it, you never touch me unless you’re informing me that we’re due a fuck. It’s frankly phenomenal sex—but it could be awful, and I’d still want it because you were there. Though we go about it as though it’s all we can think of to do with one another anymore, and I resent that.” Blake dropped his hand.

Avon thought back to Blake’s stiff, tense shoulders under his hands, just before and after the fights that had made the state of their relationship clear to him, and wondered if some of that early tension might have bled out of Blake in the intervening months. Given time and opportunity to miss Avon again, after Avon had gone out on the early Pylene bombings. Avon hadn’t tried it recently—he’d assumed Blake’s reception would be no warmer. After all, _Blake_ didn’t attempt it. But then perhaps he’d given Blake, very early in their acquaintance, the (incorrect) impression that he wasn’t the sort of person who would welcome that kind of gesture.

“It can feel at times as though you’re impersonally relieving tension and boredom, and I just happen to be convenient,” Blake continued, rubbing his face with his hands. “Or more personally, but equally horribly, like you’re trying to use sex to atone. I’m besotted with you, _mad_ about you, and you _sat there_ asking me if we were exclusive, as though we weren’t even in a relationship.” His tone had risen. Even the memory of the exchange angered him.

Avon—thought he’d try something.

“This is going to be slightly awkward, at first,” he warned Blake wryly. “Brace yourself.” He clambered on top of Blake’s lap and ran his fingers over the back of Blake’s neck, up into his hair. He twisted his fingers in the curls. He buried his face in Blake’s hair and breathed deeply, closing his eyes. Catching the scent of him. He opened his eyes again and passed the back of his knuckles over Blake’s cheek. Blake watched him, his eyes fixed on Avon’s. Avon traced the scar over Blake’s eye with his finger. He then dipped his head to kiss Blake, chastely. Still reveling in the feeling of it.

“I want to touch you constantly,” Avon murmured. “It’s—difficult not to, actually. Once you held me, while you were asleep, and I—” Avon swallowed. “I’ve kept hoping it might reoccur. You were so stiff, when I tried, those first months. I thought you might be subconsciously afraid of me, after what happened. Despite yourself.”

Blake looked at him sadly. “At first, I was.”

Avon closed his eyes. Nodded sharply.

“I’m so sorry for having hurt you,” Blake said, and Avon opened them again to find Blake looked close to crying. “I know I have, this entire year, I—” his strong voice wavered, and Avon clutched Blake’s head to his chest. He wanted to tell Blake not to cry, but Avon also wanted Blake’s feeling, this proof of Blake’s love, badly, and thought it might help Blake to have it out. Blake’s chest started to shake in his arms, and Avon felt himself pulled to the brink by it.

“It was idiotic of me, you should never have been put in that position. And I’ve made it worse. I know I’ve made it worse,” Blake said with decision. “I’ve been so profoundly unhappy. And I couldn’t _tell_ you.” He shook his head. “How could I ever feel safe again, if not with you? And if I could never feel secure anywhere, then it didn’t seem to matter what risks I took. How could I trust anyone, if not you? What was left for me, in terms of personal happiness, if looking at _you_ made me feel like I’d swallowed knives?”

“Shh,” Avon said, his fingers twisting deeper into Blake’s hair. “I won’t blame madness, but I won’t blame you either. That _was_ an asinine plan. I _was_ somewhat mad. But ultimately, _I_ believed unforgivable things of you, that you never could have believed of me. But I—didn’t believe them, I never _believed_ them.” Avon hoped that made a scrap of sense. He’d had a year to mull over the incident, and still found it difficult to speak of. Impossible to explain his feelings at the time, or even now.

“I don’t want forgiveness, Blake,” he tried. “I have never been trying to atone for myself. Or rather, I should like that absolution, but that desire is _nothing_ , compared—“ Avon heard his voice crack. Tried again. “I want _your_ forgiveness. I want to be right with you. Because—because your trust is _everything_ to me, and I’d kill myself before hurting you again, and if you can’t be happy then no one deserves to be. I don’t need to be absolved of guilt. I need _you_ , and I need you to be—” Avon hunted a word, and could find nothing that meant ‘well’, ‘happy’, and ‘yourself’, at once.

Blake looked up at him, wet-eyed, and Avon’s breath caught.

“I think,” Blake said, “that what was real, what _mattered_ , was you looking for me, when I disappeared. How you’ve tried and tried with me this year. All that time, against that minute of confusion.”

Blake looked at him as though he were trying to look into him. “I watched the security footage while I was laid up in hospital, trying to work out where it had all gone so wrong. I saw how you stood over me, when you believed you’d killed me. When those troops rushed in. I didn’t understand it, but now I think I might. It was as though you wanted to die protecting me. Like that was all that mattered to you, there at the end—as though you didn’t want either of us to die alone. And if it had to come to this, this was how you wanted it.”

Avon didn’t trust himself to speak.

“You did, didn’t you?” Blake said.

Avon couldn’t look at him. Just nodded.

Blake lifted up Avon’s chin with his hand, and there was such conviction in Blake’s gaze. “Then that’s ultimately what this meant. That’s what this was. You protecting me is so much more important than something you did because you were exhausted and confused and horrified by the prospect of betrayal, horrified _because_ you loved me as you did. And since that’s what happened, there was never anything to forgive. I can only thank you for trying to give me that.”

A memory, historical or personal, was always constructed. Always formed and marshaled as it was to serve a purpose. Always part of a narrative. And Blake’s narrative, theirs, would be this.

“Love you as I do,” Avon corrected him. Blake’s thanks, hard-won, were an even more profound consolation and absolution than Blake’s immediate forgiveness could have been.

“Yes,” Blake smiled.

Avon traced Blake’s scarred eye once more.

“I know it bothers you,” Blake said. “I made a mistake, and I wanted to remember having made it. I grew sullen, in your absence. And then I saw that it hurt you, to look at me like this, and I left it to fester because I wanted to hurt you. Almost to repulse you. I didn’t feel like the man you’d known anymore, and I wanted to make that obvious.”

“You never did repulse me,” Avon said. “And you never change.”

“Is that so?” Blake asked. “I want to get rid of it, now. I don’t want to wallow in my mistakes. I don’t _need_ to, any more. We can move on.”

“That isn’t precisely why it bothered me,” Avon admitted. “But I won’t be sorry to see it go. And perhaps I should have specified—you never change in the ways that define you. You are the most stubborn thing in the universe.”

“Bar you,” Blake said. “Though I expect you think a jacket with more metal bits represents some great alteration in your character.”

Avon frowned, thought about disclosing his immense anxiety about having changed to Blake, and then—decided to do it, actually. But later. Later, he’d ask how Blake got that scar. Later, he’d tell Blake why the scar had upset him. He would tell Blake everything. They couldn’t talk enough. Their armistice could stretch on forever, and it wouldn’t be nearly long enough to suit him.

But they’d have to start somewhere, and Blake preempted him.

“The other day, I said Penelope was clever. That’s true. But Penelope’s loyal, that’s the first thing about her. Stubbornly, brilliantly loyal, _and_ clever. That’s why she reminds me of you. I didn’t want to say that to you then. I should have.”

He twined his fingers through Blake’s, weaving them together.

“There’s time to say everything we should have said.”

“There is,” Blake agreed. “And we’ll do better, in future. Next year, we might even manage Christmas presents.”

Avon shifted uncomfortably. “I got you one, actually. Courtesy of Vila’s services and a frankly improbable sum of money. I wasn’t going to give it to you, so much as pretend I knew nothing about it and spring it on you. Rather literally.”

Blake arched an eyebrow. “Well, now you have me curious. What is it?”

Avon muttered something under his breath, looking over Blake’s head. Twin red spots had risen in his cheeks.

“Avon,” Blake said.

“Mistletoe,” Avon said shortly, and rather more loudly. “I—read about it.”

Blake laughed, and Avon found he didn’t have to resort to trickery to get what he wanted after all. Though Christmas as a concept had worked out very well for him, all in all. And while he had no intention of becoming ‘as good a friend, as good a master, and as good a man, as the good old city knew’, he still thought he might try to honour Christmas in his heart, and try to keep it all the year, and to live in the Past, the Present, and the Future and not shut out the lessons that they taught—provided that doing so would ensure Blake kept holding him like this all the year round.

 


End file.
